I love fantasy, but fantasy series are kind of nefarious for some… problems.

Series that drag on to reach an arbitrary number, creating a number of filler books. (8/9/10 of a certain series comes to mind for “filler books” )

Series that keep going for so long and lose the thread, straight up making what happened in previous books seem silly and irrelevant.

Books that vary wildly in quality (book 10, shout out to you again)

Series that aren’t finished (GRRM fans, you might get your books if he lives long enough. King Killer chronicle fans… I’m sorry, but the author is dead even if the man remains).

I just really wanna try a bunch of fantasy standalone novels from different authors. But I can’t for the life of me find a website that’ll let me do that. Amazon will say after clicking on it “book 1 of x”, so like the information is there, but I can’t find any website that let’s me search for it. I can find websites that list like “Top x standalone novels of the year” but those are usually really click baity.

“Finished series only” filter would be sick as well.

Anyone have any ideas?

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
      15·
      7 months ago

      gasp

      And there are even recommended tag mashes for different genres! I have found my people who have been similarly hurt by picking up a book that they thought was a standalone, then running right into a cliff hanger wall and an unfinished series.

      • mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        1·
        7 months ago

        I also am glad to have this tool but am responding to you in particular to find out what the certain book series is where 8/9/10 are filler novels, because I hate read things sometimes

        • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          7 months ago

          If you google “which wheel of time can I skip” you will find many discussions about it.

          You’ll also find fan edits where for a ton of chapters are skipped and instead gives a small update of anything important that happened.

          Famously, despite women being incredibly powerful and it having tons of female characters that talk to one another, he gives a lot of them quirks that get brought up all the time.

  • xmunk@sh.itjust.works
    11·
    7 months ago

    In case you haven’t already read him Terry Pratchett has some excellent works and while in theory the books are set in the same universe… in practice they’re all stand alone novels. I’d suggest starting with Guards! Guards!

    • Alex@lemmy.ml
      5·
      7 months ago

      There are even some reading guides depending on what sub-genre you are interested in if you don’t want to read the whole cannon. They all standalone pretty well though.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      7 months ago

      Haha my gf reads fan fiction and I do get jealous!

      She can do “cozy platonic, slow burn” with any 3 characters in a story and she’ll get a perfect list as if it’d been hand curated for her despite it being a seemingly insane thing to look for.

      Like how come I can’t just click on good reads " finished series only" but she can find a list of all stories where the main characters have been turned into cats and snuggle up together???

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    1·
    7 months ago

    Lots of times you can ‘one and done’ a series. Dune comes to mind as a great novel on it’s own even if you ignore the rest of the series.

    But I understand what you mean. The only time I’ve been glad to read an entire series was Kings “Gunslinger”.

    • ericbomb@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      7 months ago

      My Canon ends with Dune so thats a good point!

      Most people only care about the first book though, so I’m not special there.