SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

I finished reading this fantastic book one of an 18 book+ epic fantasy—The Saga of Recluce. It's a June group read for one of my groups. I like it a lot and want to continue, but have all these big piles of books I'be not yet read. What to do?

Any advice from those who've read the whole series?

if you're not compelled by the story to continue why get into an intractable 20+ book series

I really like the Recluce books, but even though I tend to be a series completist, I haven't read them all. (I didn't get as far as the Cyador books.) I find them a bit slow-paced, even though I enjoy the level of detail. Because Modesitt often skips a good amount of in-world time between books to write a novel or two with a whole new cast of characters, I feel a little more free to skip around as a reader.

The Towers of the Sunset is one of my favorites, but it's kind of an outlier: a distant prequel to Magic of Recluce with unusual POV and tense.

I think I've read most of the Recluce books over the years (but probably not the most recent ones).

I've enjoyed them most of the time, but yes, they are long-winded and slightly slow going, so I don't think they are as popular as they could be.

One of my niggles is that for a series there is no time-line conformity; by that I mean that one could read one book, then go on to the next one thinking "continuity" but it's just as likely to be a 'prequel' or a 'sequel' to another in the series. AND, there is no logic, or 'history'.

So, in essence, to my mind, they are basically all stand-alone books written about the same "world" but at different periods of time. There's only a couple of examples where a character appears in more than one book.

I've managed to read so many because there was usually about 18 months between paperback publications and I'd forgotten what I'd read previously :)

Don't let all that put you off, though. They are quite decent books.

I like them! They do tend to be a bit slow paced, though. But very detailed. And, yeah, they do tend to jump around in time. Really, its more a lots of little series and some stand alones, all set in the same world. it's not really a continuous series. You can pick it from pretty much any point.

One thing that annoys me is how similar all his main characters sound, how they all use similar turns of phrase.

I've read almost every book published by L.E. Modesitt, including all of the Recluce series. I enjoy his writing quite a bit, but I'm the first to admit that it's not to everyone's taste.
The author's style tends to be very heavy on inner monologues and self-reflection, and some of the recurrent themes and stylistic choices in his novels can get repetitive.
For example, he's very descriptive about any food eaten, which is fun for me, but sometimes it seems that everyone in the entire Recluce universe eats egg-toast for breakfast every single day. Also, the author uses a lot onomatopoeia or writing out sound effects, which some people find off-putting.
That being said, I'm a big fan of Modesitt's works, both fantasy and science fiction. I particularly enjoyed the first three books in the Imager series.

I wish more people would read this series. Its great. He does things I have never seen any where else in epic fantasy.

But people might like it because the reader has where chronologically the series starts or ends because he could write a prequel or sequel at will.