Look, I love a good series. There’s something genuinely satisfying about falling into a world and knowing there’s more waiting for you when you turn the last page. But I’ll be honest — I don’t always have the bandwidth to commit to seventeen books, a prequel novella, and three companion guides just to feel like I’ve gotten the full story. Sometimes you want a series that respects your time and your TBR. These five series (and one standalone with friends) do exactly that. From magic to space travel to post-apocalyptic survival, these are the ones I keep recommending to everyone who will stand still long enough to listen.
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Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
If someone told you that the premise of this series was “a 75-year-old man enlists in the military, gets a brand new genetically enhanced body, and goes to fight aliens,” you might think it sounds ridiculous. You’d be right, and it’s also one of the most fun sci-fi series I’ve read. Scalzi writes with a snarky, self-aware humor that keeps the military sci-fi elements from getting too heavy, but don’t let that fool you, there’s real heart here, and the worldbuilding is genuinely impressive. John Perry is a character you root for immediately, and the universe Scalzi builds around him just keeps expanding. Hugo Award nominated and seven books deep, with the final installment The Shattering Peace out last September.
Thursday Next by Jasper Fforde
This series is genuinely unlike anything else I’ve ever read, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. Set in an alternate history Britain where the Crimean War never ended, literature is a national obsession, and dodos are a popular pet, Thursday Next is a literary detective who can literally jump inside books to solve crimes within the pages of fiction itself. It’s absurd, it’s clever, it’s packed with literary jokes that will make you feel very smug if you catch them, and the characters are some of the most memorable I’ve encountered. Currently seven books in with the eighth and final installment, Dark Reading Matter, due in 2026. Do not sleep on this one.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Here’s the pitch: Narnia, but make it trauma. Quentin Coldwater gets into a secret magic college and discovers that the fantasy world he grew up obsessing over is real — and deeply, irreparably messed up. This is dark academia before dark academia was a thing, and Grossman doesn’t pull punches. It’s Hogwarts for adults who have been through some things. If you watched the Syfy show and loved it, the books hit even harder. If you watched the show and hated it, read the books anyway they’re a different beast. Three books, complete series, and absolutely worth the emotional damage.
Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett
This one doesn’t get nearly enough attention and I will die on that hill. What would happen if the rigid social constraints of a Jane Austen novel had a fantastical, magical explanation? That’s the question Galen Beckett set out to answer, and the result is a gothic romance fantasy set in a Regency-inspired world where magic is forbidden, secrets are everywhere, and Ivy Lockwell is trying to hold her family together while navigating a society that doesn’t think much of women with ambitions. It’s atmospheric, romantic, and genuinely unsettling in the best way. Three books, complete series, and criminally underread.
Alex Stern (Ninth House) by Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo’s first adult novel, and she came out swinging. Alex Stern is a dropout and trauma survivor with one very specific talent, she can see ghosts, which is exactly why Yale recruits her to police the secret societies that practice actual dangerous occult magic on campus. Dark academia, elite institutions using power for terrible things, a protagonist who has absolutely nothing left to lose, and ghosts everywhere. It’s atmospheric and brutal and compulsively readable. Currently two books in with the third and final installment due in 2026. Plus there’s an HBO Max adaptation in development, so get ahead of it now.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Okay, technically this is a standalone novel, not a series — but Mandel has written two companion novels set in the same world (The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility), so you can absolutely keep going if you fall in love with her writing, which you will. Station Eleven follows a traveling Shakespeare company twenty years after a flu pandemic has collapsed civilization, and the stories weave together across timelines in a way that shouldn’t work as well as it does. It’s post-apocalyptic but literary, bleak but beautiful, and the HBO Max adaptation is genuinely one of the best things I’ve watched in years. Not a traditional series, but interconnected stories that reward you for paying attention.
If even one of these ends up on your TBR, my work here is done. And if you’ve already read all of them, first of all same, and second let’s talk about what’s next.
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