Friday Favourites? Your Favourite Series Of Books?

Friday Favourites - a chance to rave about a favourite reading/book related topic each week.

Sometimes you just want a chance to rave about some favourite aspect of reading that doesn't really come up during regular blogging posts - that's what this is about. I'm willing to bet that at least some of those will come up one week or another.

This week I'm asking what your favourite series of books is. It doesn't have to be a series following one character, although that's one of the more common definitions. That, though would knock out over half the series that I follow these days for example.

Please leave either a link to your response or your response itself in the comments.

I posted this question, but I'm having a difficult time answering it myself. Should I go with the Numinous World books by Jo Graham, the Adept series by Katherine Kurtz and Deborah Turner Harris, or maybe the Valdemar books by Mercedes Lackey? Or even something else? All of these are series that I end up re-reading on a regular basis.

After due consideration though, I'm going to have to go with Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar series as my favourite. Not for any specific merit as to writing or quality necessarily, but more because these books are ones where I've been looking forward to the new releases since the publication of the Mage Storms and Mage Wars trilogies. They are also books that I can nearly always pick up, read and enjoy, even when I'm in a reading slump.

Yes, they can be a little formulaic in terms of the characters, but still the books are enjoyable. I call them "old friends" just for that. And, honestly, the characters have stuck in my head and stayed interesting through umpteen re-reads.

The Valdemar books are more about an entire world than anything else - not even all set in one country or time period. They certainly don't just follow one character or family of characters.  Most of the books though do focus on the country of Valdemar, but not all of them. Two of the earliest published certainly don't, the Tarma and Kethry books Oathbound and Oathbreaker.

I'm calling the whole world a series, although to be honest, for the most part the books are set as separate trilogies, with a couple of stand-alones and sets of two thrown in.

Another reason I'm sticking with the Valdemar books as my favourite series is simply that with at least two of the books Mercedes Lackey has left me in tears with the ending - even after a dozen re-reads. In this case I'm referring to Magic's Price and Brightly Burning.

I ask again, what's your favourite series?