Monday Musings - Why can't there be a Skipologue???

A while back, on October 13, 2011, I saw a tweet from author Kelley Armstrong saying she was working on writing that delicate portion of a book where you try to add just enough information from the previous books so a newbie to the series isn't lost, but a person who's loyally kept up with the series doesn't get annoyed or bored. Here is the original quote, "Worst part of starting new book in existing series? Sliding in enough "catch-up" info for new readers, while not boring current readers."

Believe me, I've read books that have given too little or too much information and I can see where this would be a bit of a challenge. My tweet back was, "Too bad there's no such thing as a skipologue* that people who are up to date on a series could skip. lol"

Yes, I know there are prologues, but in my experience they usually set up an event which happened prior to the story to get your attention and/or explain something that happens at a later point in the story. Author Richelle Mead, however, did something like I was suggesting in her prologue for 'Frostbite'. When I read it over a year ago I made the comment, "I really liked how Mead made reference to all the important items about the world she created in the prologue." I liked how it was done in a way that if we weren't interested in a recap of the previous book, 'Vampire Academy', we could just skip it. Who knows, maybe the age of the digital eBook could truly make it a skippable feature and adapt the book to the reader? One can only hope.

* I know skip would probably be the wrong term to use to preface logue, but hey it's all Greek to me, which the terms may very well have originated from. :)