Reading the first books in several long series simultaneously is not a practice I'd recommend generally, but it taught me something about genre. I was reading the first Wheel of Time, the first Malazan, and the first Stormlight Archive concurrently over a year. The comparison was instructive.

The Wheel of Time builds a world and a mythology first, then puts characters into it. The Malazan Book of the Fallen drops you into a world that already has thousands of years of history and expects you to orient yourself. The Stormlight Archive starts with character and uses world-building as background that enriches the character work.

These are three different approaches to the same problem: how do you establish a large world without losing the reader in the first hundred pages? Jordan prioritizes comprehensibility. Erikson prioritizes depth. Sanderson prioritizes attachment. I found that I responded most to the third approach, which taught me something about what I read for.