Which order?

Oren asked...

It's up to you, but I really think that you'll get much more out of it if you read the books in sequence and read Long Sun before Short Sun. They are intimately related. To do it the other way round would be like reading Urth of the New Sun before The Book of the New Sun. Once you start reading Short Sun, you'll want to go off and read Long Sun anyway, so why not take them in order in the first place? Or let me put it another way. Long Sun is brilliant, so why miss out on a treat? Nigel

This is true, and I do indeed want to read the Long Sun now I've started on the Short Sun; but the other point I'd make is that 'On Blue's Waters' is a beautiful novel in its own right, and reading it without any other knowledge of 'Urth' wasn't detrimental (for me, at least). The quality of OBW as a really marvellous work of literature, in its own right, shone through, and it never felt incomplete, as a novel. If that makes sense... And this, I think, is what was at the heart of my devil's advocacy :o) Best, G.