Series that went on too long- lots of mini rants!

I considered being nice and titling this list something like: “series I lost interest in”- but that would be totally disingenuous, cos if I lost interest in a lot of these, I wouldn’t have bothered to read so many before calling it quits (in some cases 6- yes 6!- whole books!).  So instead, these are my (entirely subjective) book series that went downhill and could’ve stopped earlier:

Poison Study– Jeez- where to even start? I’ve said a number of times that I had given up on this series, because after the first book it was all over the place. It went from really unique to generic fantasy to WTF is even happening to oh gosh why… So yeah, I should’ve called it quits around book 2/3, especially considering how much I hated 3. The first books as well were originally a trilogy and that would’ve been fine- I should’ve stopped there. But, of course it continued and because *I am weak* and saw this in the library last week, I will admit rather shame-facedly that I finished this series the other day (to be fair, I was trying to counterbalance some of the darker books on my tbr as well). Thankfully it wasn’t the clusterfuck I’d come to expect from the series, although that doesn’t mean it was good #somuchguilt

Twilight– I will happily say that the first book isn’t that bad. I know this is unlikely to make me friends in either the Twihard group or the Diehard-We-Hate-Twilight side- nonetheless, I still consider book 1 firmly as a 3* read. Sure, it has sparkly vampires (for which this series has a special place in the circles of hell) but apart from that it’s pretty enjoyable. If it had ended there, with Bella becoming a vampire, it would have been a decent standalone. What, prey, could be worse than sparkly vampires? I hear you ask. Well let’s see, the later books devolved into: the unnecessary breakup book, the “is this whole book really centred on a marriage proposal?!” book, and finally the “did this just accidentally endorse paedophilia?! I am OUT!” book. Yeahhh there are good reasons why I stopped liking that series.

The Mortal Instrument– I’m kind of including all the spinoffs here as well and the reading order I did, just to be clear, was Infernal Devices, Mortal Instruments and now reading Dark Artifices (so help me!) I really loved the Infernal Devices series (though I get why if you’ve read Mortal Instruments first this might feel a bit samey) and thoroughly enjoyed Mortal Instruments overall (even though they are very similar to TID). But then, books 4-6 came and they just felt totally unnecessary (in fact, they were tacked on after the original trilogy ended, figures). And now I’m stupidly continuing with TDA- basically cos I want to know that one thing about parabatai- yet I’m not enjoying it anymore. I’m sorry, I know people love this series- I’m just finding it *so repetitive*, some of the bad guys less nuanced and the rest of them not properly bad at all. I think there are some redeeming features- only it’s not as good as it used to be.

Alex Rider– how many times can Alex Rider save the world in a year? For that matter, why are so many villains trying to *destroy the world* in the space of one year? And before people get annoyed at me for beating on a children’s book, I read this when I was a child and my teenage self could see how totally implausible this was, so… Seriously, why did Alex Rider have to stay 14 for the duration of the series? Plus, how many broken bones does he get that somehow heal? Doesn’t he get shot at one point? And go into space? How could he…? How?? Yeah, this got dumber and dumber.

The Savant Series– erm, I kinda blame myself for continuing this series. I viewed it as a bit of fun, especially the idea is basically *psychic soulmates*- which is basically enjoyable for a couple of books before it gets tiresome. I mean, how many times can this actually work? The primary reason why it’s on this list is cos the characters and situations they found themselves in got more and more annoying. I get it’s a cashgrab from suckers like me and I don’t really know what I was hoping for when it got to book 6- I just think the romance part could’ve been consistently good, even if the concept got old.

Stravaganza– I actually really love the first book and still recommend it to everyone- but you can just stop there and read it as a standalone. Even though there’s hints of bigger stuff going on, even after 4 or 5 books (I lost track of how many I read) it never really goes into the bigger conspiracies. Also, the whole book’s idea was that it’s a way of people from our world resolving their problems in an alternate-universe version of Venice and while the first person has cancer, the problems get significantly less important. This may be a bit harsh, but I like stories to up the ante, not feel tired and been there-done that.

The Declaration Series– again, I think it’s totally worth reading the first book. It’s actually a very cool dystopian take on what the consequences of living forever would be. And while it suffers from that YA need of turning everything into a series and resolving all the dystopia-problems (you know that annoying reset-the-world thing YA dystopias do), I don’t think the later books had to be so terrible. Both the original concept and the basic plots could have worked. HOWEVER, there was so much unnecessary filler- in particular the last book spent about half the page count recapping the first two books- WHY?! I am really not a fan of recaps in books (all the credit to Mark Lawrence who recently came up with the genius idea of sticking that in before the book starts) but I do get why people like a paragraph or two- half the book however?! Nope- no way! And I also thought the ending was infuriating (spoiler alert: they reset the world *and* hinted that in ten years it’d all just end up happening again… why?! You can’t have your cake and eat it too!!) So yeah, this one gets me all heated and no one gets it cos barely anyone made it to the end.

So do you agree or disagree with any of my choices? Are there any book series you’ve fallen out of love with? Let me know in the comments!