Artemis Fowl: The Reading Order, and Why It's Worth a Revisit as an Adult

Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl follows a twelve-year-old criminal mastermind who discovers an advanced, hidden world of fairies — and decides to exploit it. Read it in publication order: Artemis Fowl, The Arctic Incident, The Eternity Code, The Opal Deception, The Lost Colony, The Time Paradox, The Atlantis Complex, and The Last Guardian.

The reason to read them in order is that Artemis himself is the arc. He starts as a cold, calculating antagonist-shaped protagonist and slowly grows a conscience over eight books, while the supporting cast — especially the LEPrecon officer Holly Short and the dwarf Mulch Diggums — get richer with every installment. Jumping in midway spoils that transformation.

If you read these as a kid, they hold up surprisingly well on a reread: the heist-thriller plotting is tight, the fairy tech is clever, and the humor is sharper than you probably remember. They're middle-grade in marketing but genuinely fun at any age.

Were you Team Artemis or Team Holly? And does the series stick the landing for you, or do you have a favorite mid-series entry that you think is the real peak? Tell us below.