Based on all the feedback I’ve received about the various options I’ve posted over the last few weeks, this is the reading order I’m currently planning to use.
If you’re considering joining in for some or all of the re-read, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this reading order.
That goes double if you were considering joining in but find this reading order off-putting. I don’t want to frighten people away; I don’t think it would be nearly as much fun to do the re-read alone.
General overview
The basic organizing principle is chronological order, the internal order of events.
There are places where I have split up novels to fit in stories that take place between chapters. If I hear from people that this is a problem for them, I’ll reconsider, but for me I see finding out how things fit together as part of the point of doing it chronological.
(For myself, I don’t have any particular problem with re-reading a Liaden novel piecemeal. Many’s the time I’ve taken one up to re-read just a particular scene or a chapter or two.)
I have resisted any urge to split individual chapters or short stories. I have mostly avoided scheduling lots of back-and-forth between novels that overlap chronologically, and attempted to keep each novel’s chapters in the same order as printed (though I Dare is a law unto itself).
I have attempted to place the splits where there’s a natural break in the flow of the story, even when that means fudging the chronology a bit. (Interestingly, in practice there turn out to be places where respecting the flow of the story means that I would rather break between chapters of a novel than between novels. For instance, I would hate to put anything between the end of Scout’s Progress and the beginning of Mouse and Dragon, while the multi-year-gap between two late chapters of Mouse and Dragon feels like fair game, the more so since it follows what might easily have been the ending point of the novel.)
Draft Reading Order
- “Dragon Tide”
- “Necessary Evils”
- Crystal Soldier
- Crystal Dragon
- “Eleutherios”
- “Where the Goddess Sends”
- “A Spell for the Lost”
- “The Wine of Memory”
- Balance of Trade
- Trade Secret
- “Naratha’s Shadow”
- “The Space at Tinsori Light”
- “Sweet Waters”
- “Phoenix”
- “Pilot of Korval”
- “A Choice of Weapons”
- “The Beggar King”
- Local Custom
- Scout’s Progress ch.1-38
- Mouse and Dragon ch.1-36
- “Guaranteed Delivery”
- Mouse and Dragon ch.37-41
- “Veil of the Dancer”
- “Heirloom”
- “Intelligent Design”
- “A Matter of Dreams”
- “Moonphase”
- Conflict of Honors ch.1
- “Fighting Chance”
- “To Cut an Edge”
- “Shadow Partner”
- “A Day at the Races”
- “Certain Symmetry”
- “This House”
- Conflict of Honors ch.2-50
- “Changeling”
- Fledgling
- Saltation ch.1-32
- “Landed Alien”
- Agent of Change
- Carpe Diem ch.2-35
- “Quiet Knives”
- Carpe Diem ch.36-71
- I Dare ch.1-4,10-12
- “Daughter of Dragons”
- “Persistence”
- I Dare ch.18,20,22-23,25-27,29-30,35-36
- Plan B ch.1-3
- “Breath’s Duty”
- I Dare ch.40-42
- Plan B ch.4-30
- I Dare ch.46-48,50
- Plan B ch.31-35
- I Dare ch.5-9,13-17,19,21,24,28,31-34,37-39,43-44,53
- I Dare ch.45,49,51-52,54-57
- “Misfits”
- Saltation ch.33-41
- Saltation ch.42 & I Dare ch.58
- Ghost Ship ch.1-5
- “Moon on the Hills”
- Ghost Ship ch.6-23
- “Hidden Resources”
- “Kin Ties”
- Ghost Ship ch.24-epilogue
- “Prodigal Son”
- Necessity’s Child
- Dragon Ship
- “Skyblaze”