How I failed my #serieschallenge

At the end of 2015, I claimed that I was going to finish a series every month of 2016. I had a reading plan, I knew exactly which books I was going to read when, and there was no possibility of failure.
But I still managed to fall... And it wasn't even at the last hurdle, it was at one of the very first ones!

I am bad at finishing series. There are a lot of reasons for this:

• I hoard friends. I try to keep in touch with everyone, and when I can't do that in real life it SUCKS. The end of a series means saying goodbye to a bunch of characters who have become your friends throughout their adventures over the years, and I just can't do it.
• I'm scared of commitment. I look at a series as thick as Game of Thrones or as long as the House of Night series, and I have palpitations. 
• They're always disappointing. Okay, probably not always. But this year I ACTUALLY FINISHED A.G. Howard's Splintered series, the Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo and Pierce Brown's Red Rising trilogy, and all of the final installments fell flat. Some more than others: 'Ruin and Rising' RUINED the entire trilogy for me (haha, geddit?!) while 'Morning Star' only fell a little short, and still managed to get 5 stars from me. 

And those three aspects make finishing a series extremely scary. I might love the first few books and then have the third installment absolutely destroy everything, leaving me seething with barely contained rage (*cough* Divergent *cough*).
Or it can go the other way. I hated Erika Johansen's 'The Queen of the Tearling', loved the sequel 'The Invasion of the Tearling' and am currently really enjoying the final book in the series. Because I detested that first book so utterly and completely, I didn't have high expectations, which has made it a lot easier for me to read - and enjoy - the later installments.

In 2016, I finished (or caught up with the current releases of) 17 series.
I started (or started rereading) 22 series.
When you look at it like that, not too bad. A bit worse when you consider that 13 out of the 17 that I've caught up on are also 13 out of the 22 I started... That means I finished (or caught up on) 4 series that I was already reading. That's not many. Whoops.
I would have liked to have finished more series than the ones that I started, because I'm currently midway through so many that it would have made more sense.
There are so many series that I still haven't even started (Throne of Glass, The Young Elites, Shatter Me, etc.) and I'd like to finish (or at least catch up with) a few more before I start to tackle those. I'm definitely going to make more of an effort in 2017, and by the end of the year I WILL have finished all of those series I talked about last year... I hope.