Dear anon, this is an impossible question to answer a simple “Books 1-4″ or “Books 1-3, and then 5″ or such and so forth…

… as some ppl refuse to read Prince Lestat, or a bunch of the other books, won’t even give them a chance not that they all deserve a wholehearted chance necessarily… 

Most of the fandom, in my experience, have had different gateway drugs to the series. I love collecting stories of how people first got into it (#I love these kind of stories tag). They first saw movie!IWTV or movie!QOTD and then read the corresponding book, or a friend gave them a random one from the series, or someone donated the whole series to them, etc. From there, some people read in order, some people skipped around.

PERSONALLY, I first started with IWTV and at that time (1994) the movie was out but being rated R, I was too young to see it, so I read the books that were available at the time (1-4), in order. I also snuck over to a friend’s house to see movie!IWTV when it came out on VHS (I’M OLD), which we watched repeatedly, and it attained this *~forbidden-fruit~* sort of connotation for me which has never dissipated. 

Then I continued and just read the books as they came out. Hard to imagine, but there was a time when we waited, not knowing when the next book would come out, or if there would be another at all. AR originally intended to end the series at Memnoch the Devil, which is probably why it ends like this: 

“Let me pass now from fiction into legend. 

THE END

9:43 February 28, 1994

Adieu, mon amour.”

THAT SAID, if you want to make VC fanworks (including fic, meta discussion, fanart, etc.) or do VC RP, it seems to help if you’ve read at least IWTV, TVL, and TVA (TVA might spoil previous events in canon but it’s really THE authority on Armand)(and read some fanfic!). 

I think those VC contain the crux of the fan fave characters (Lestat, Louis, ((Nicki)), Gabrielle, Armand, Daniel, Marius) and scenes that have had alot of impact in developing the main characters. Your fanworks/RP will be richer if you know the background of the characters, because you’ll be able to refer to the events, or quotes, or take them as a jumping-off point in your work.

However, in the later books, you get new info, new characters, and new perspectives on previous events (example: Claudia’s diary entry in QOTD is heartwrenching).