Automatic Jack Wrote:Just wondering, seeing as I'm likely not to get any sleep tonight, which of the novels was your first? By which I mean, which one of the books precipitated your transition from RJ virgin to full-blown Jackaholic? (Forgive me if this is a repeat of another thread.)

As for me, I was very fond of Masque before I'd even heard of the RJ books, but one day I was surfing the library shelves and the bright green of Hosts caught my eye. I kind of wish I could recapture that feeling of simply jumping into the series without any background knowledge of the previous books; other than a few references to "that event", it was fairly stand-alone. And it was early enough that the meaning of certain motifs, like women with dogs, wasn't as imperative to my understanding.

If you'll recall, Hosts also starts out from the POV of a character other than RJ, which added to the unsettling feeling of reading out of order. I can't quite remember what I thought about it, except that I must have liked it enough to immediately borrow the whole series. I guess for me, you could say Hosts was a "Gateway" novel, har dee har.

And then after I was hooked, I'd fully read up to Haunted Air before even getting my hands on a copy of The Tomb, because the library had every book except the first one So it was very interesting to read the series backwards like I did. The characters and events are revealed in a slightly skewed manner that you wouldn't get from reading them chronologically. Of course I'm forced to go at them in order from now on, since whenever a new one comes out I read it immediately!