Reading order for Dragonlance?

I wanted to try out more of Weis and Hickman's works(I liked the Deathgate Cycle very much), and I decided to do it with Dragonlance. Since there are a lot of books in the series, can somebody clarify whether I should be reading in the chronological order or not?

Answer

I would start with the Chronicles and move on to the Legends series. The first set of Tales, which are collections of short stories, has some great side stories for the main characters and their children.

In my opinion the rest of the series doesn't match the quality of the first 6 books. So after you finish reading the first 6 and the first tales, one should probably read the rest of them in release date order. Because a bunch of wars, world-changing epochs, and characters appear after the first 6 that are only tangentially related to the plots of the first 6.

I've read dozens of the Dragonlance novels by authors other than Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman and most of them are really not that great. The Preludes I and II, are not written by Weis and Hickman, and you should only read them if you really love the characters. In later novels, Weis and Hickman almost explicitly ret-con out the events of the Preludes novels, though a few plot-lines survive into Dragons of Summer Flame. This kind of creates a canon versus non-canon perspective of Preludes and other non-Weis and Hickman novels and stories.

The first Chronicles novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight:

The original cover of Dragons of Autumn Twilight

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