A major annoyance when reading book series (fiction), and a great sign of lacking professionalism among authors, is the waste of the reader’s time with endless recaps of what happened in the previous books, who various characters are, how various mechanisms of e.g. magic work, etc., integrated into the main text. (For simplicity, I will just use “recap[s]” or, when disambiguation is needed, “integrated recap[s]”.)
In at least one prior case, the situation grew so bad that I stopped reading a book series entirely.
This was a very long time ago, likely late 1990s, so my memory is vague, but it was likely Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series, which additionally featured problems like alleged heroes doing evil deeds in the name of good, while failing to consider that “evil is as evil does”.
At the time of writing (2025-12-05), I am reading the “Shield Hero” series by Aneko Yusagi (in English translation), and the situation is so bad that I have typically skipped most of the lengthy prologues, exactly because they are overladen with recaps—and repetitive recaps, at that. After skipping the prologue, I read on with the respective first chapter and am hit with further recaps... This not just integrated in the main text, but interspersed in it in such a manner that there might be a paragraph of (new) content followed by a paragraph of recap, followed by a sentence of content, followed by a paragraph of recap, followed by a paragraph of content, followed by a sentence of recap, etc. This makes it hard to extract the contents without wasting time on the recap and is very frustrating. Indeed, even after the first chapter, there are recurring (but less dense and intrusive) recaps when e.g. a character from a previous book makes a first appearance in the current book.
An obvious cause for this is that, say, a reader who has waited a year for the next book in a series to be published can have legitimate memory holes and need a little push here-and-there. This, especially, when following several series with a great similarity in characters, plot lines, universe building, etc., which is the case with much of Japanese popular fiction. (See below for how to do it better and why the “integrated recap” approach is flawed, however.)
However, I very strongly suspect that many series (especially, “light novels”) suffer from a radically different problem—namely that the author is tasked with reaching a certain word count in a certain time and resorts to various types of filler to compensate for a lack of sufficient ability to reach the word count with actual content. Note that while the previous paragraph gives an explanation with an intended benefit for the reader (no matter how misguided), the alternative is outright reader hostile—the reader receives an inferior product for his money, both in that his time is wasted and that he is mislead about the amount of true content to expect. The author should step and do the work or have the guts to tell his publisher what his limits are, while the publisher should know better than to risk quality by making too strict demands on quantity.
Such filler can be truly obnoxious and is by no means limited to recap. Other problems include excessive dialogue that brings nothing to the story, character development, whatnot; side-stories of low quality; and unnaturally lengthy formulations, say, by using “not anything” where “nothing” would be more natural and by using “the sword that was owned by John” over “John’s sword”.
(In the last case, however, much might go back to the translator, as these problems are especially common in English translations of Japanese works. Whether the translator is also trying to earn more money on a paid-by-the-word basis or whether he lacks the competence to turn Japanese phrasings into English ones, I leave unstated—the more so, as I lack the knowledge of Japanese to make a comparison with the original texts.)
Going back a few decades, we easily find two then-popular solutions:
Firstly, simply having a dedicated recap that did nothing but recap—the equivalent of TV’s “previously on”. Someone resuming reading after a year could read the recap; someone reading on from the previous book with a break of a few days or hours could skip it without any risk of missing out on actual contents.
Secondly, having an explicit list of persons, concepts, whatnot, where the reader can just look up whatever needs to be looked up. (A good example of this is the “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” by Stephen R. Donaldson.)
In a more modern setting, the availability of the Internet might even remove the need entirely, as popular series usually have Wikipedia pages, fan sites/wikis, online summaries of books, plot lines, characters, and whatnot. While some consideration might be needed for those not currently connected, chances are that the majority of readers can simply check whatever needs to be checked on the Internet.
Likewise, if the books are in digital form, it will often be possible to just open an older book, do a quick search for e.g. a name, and get a brief refresh in that manner. (This might be a too blunt instrument in some cases, however.)
In all cases, be it with solutions like the above or with “integrated recaps”, it is rarely necessary to give truly in-depth information, because mere prodding of the reader’s memory is often enough to bring back much more, and because, where memory fails, even comparatively little context can be needed in order to read the story.
Indeed, in the days when TV broadcasts dominated my watchings, I often began to watch a series some ways in, and still had no problems with enjoying them and understanding what happened. (The same applies to some few book series, but I cannot rule out that these book series did contain various types of recaps, which would make them poor examples contra recaps.)
The underlying problem is that the author fails to consider that there are different types of readers and readings. Yes, there are those who have read the previous books shortly after the respective publication and have never re-read any of them before arriving at the book at hand. However, there are also those who take up a series when a number of books (including the book at hand) have already been published and reads them in a comparatively short time period (as I do with e.g. “Shield Hero”, those who read and re-read past books (as I once did with Terry Pratchett), and those who go to the trouble of re-reading (or skimming) the previous book shortly before buying the next book (as I at least sometimes do). Of course, any individual reader can read in different manners at different times, e.g. in that he first reads a series as it is published, spread over years, and then re-reads the entire series during a single vacation week once all the books have been published.
The “integrated recap” approach appears to be solely geared at the first type of reader/reading, while giving no thought for other types. (The above solutions remedy this without ignoring the needs of the first type.)
A similar problem is very wide-spread in other fields, e.g. in that any-and-all user of certain computer programs is assumed to be incompetent with computers, with resulting simplistic and limiting GUIs that leave power users power-less, e.g. in that TV series on DVD still have the “previously on” from the original broadcast (despite the very different viewing patterns to be expected with respectively DVDs and broadcasts).
A potential further cause might be what I refer to as “pseudo-professionalism”. This amounts to certain behaviors, choices, and similar, that superficially might seem to be professional, skilled, whatnot, while actually doing more harm than good.
While I do not know what goes on in the head of the respective authors, I could easily imagine one thinking (or his editor and/or publisher thinking) that a dedicated recap (per above solutions) would look “unprofessional” and that an “integrated recap” would be an improvement—and never mind the actual effects on the readers. This type of misguided thinking is the equivalent of putting the fridge in the basement because its color clashes with the kitchen cupboards.
Other examples of such pseudo-professionalism include the grossly artificial voices and speech patterns used on many radio shows and how many websites are overloaded with user-hostile bullshit that might look flashy and competent in the eyes of a naive executive, who does not actually have to use the website, or gives a naive web designer a triumphant feeling of “I know so many tricks! Yay me!”, while both fail to realize that the users are worse off for the efforts.
The following is an automatically generated list of other pages linking to this one. These may or may not contain further content relevant to this topic.