On the experience of reading an author's first novel after reading their later work: the first novel usually reads as a version of the writer who didn't yet know what they were doing. You can see the elements that would develop, the preoccupations that would mature, the style that would either simplify or complicate. It's a retrospective experience.

Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey reads differently after you've read Persuasion. The parody of Gothic conventions is more playful than it is interested. The emotional intelligence is present but not fully deployed. You can see someone becoming who they are.

Reading in reverse — starting with the latest work and going backward — gives you a different kind of understanding. I've done this with Doris Lessing and found the early realist novels more interesting when I understood where they were heading.