This is a long-running joke in my house, though I've mis-remembered it for years as a Kids in the Hall sketch:
better than Cats
I think a lot of "book people" take a lot of comfort in rereading a book they love. Gretchen Rubin talks about this a lot on The Happiness Project. Benjamin Disraeli famously read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times. My parents once bought me a new box set of the Little House books, because I read my first copies so often that the pages came unstuck from the bindings.
Do you have a book that you read over and over? What makes a book worthy of the reread?
6 comments:
I definitely re-read. I've gone through several copies of Diana Gabaldon's Outlander (the first book will always be my favorite!), and many others as well.
My sister is also an avid reader and, much to my absolute horror, actually SELLS her used books right after she reads them. She rolls her eyes every time she sees me reading an old battered favorite. I just can't fathom it :)
Oh, I definitely have some that I re-read over and over. Hmm, Anne of Green Gables the whole series and actually I need to go re-read it again. To Kill a Mockingbird which I try and read once every decade. Some of Jayne Ann Krentz' older books like Shield's Lady which was just re-released. Nora Robert's trilogies. I especially re-read favorites when I need to read to escape. Old favorites guarantee that I'll be able to escape the current situation. Oh, and right now, I've been re-reading Ilona Andrews and Shelly Laurenston.
I brush off the following every few years:
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Why I Left Harry's All-Night Hamburgers (short story) by Lawrence Watt-Evans.
These books were influential to me when I was younger, and I like to receive the message again from time to time.
I re-read books all the time, but usually just pieces of them. I'll pick them up (or find them on my e-reader) and re-read a favorite passage or chapter. High on my list: Stephen King's On Writing, Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy, Story of O, and an old Dean Koontz book called Voices of the Night, I believe. I also will walk past my bookshelves and pick up a book, read a few pages, and either put it down or find myself sucked in again :)
I used to re-read books on publishing and marketing, now I've found I need to buy whichever is newest since things are changing so quickly. The marketing books I have from last year have outdated info now!
Also, since I have a toddler, I read the same childrens' books every day bc he asks for his favorites. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, How do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, How do Dinosaurs Clean Their Rooms, Barney's In, Under, and Out (or something like that), Goodnight Moon, Runaway Bunny, etc etc. I know most of his favorites by heart at this point, lol.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It's my comfort book; the characters are old friends. It's a battered, though surprisingly robust, first edition that I unearthed from a garage sale box years and years ago.
Others that have received many rereadings: Pride and Prejudice, Pillars of the Earth (actually have gone through three copies of this one; keep lending it out and not getting it back), Clan of the Cave Bear, Jack Finney's Time and Again, all of the Sherlock Holmes stories.
What makes something worthy of rereading? That's a good question. Mine are all over the place in genre and style. But they are all things I first read in high school. They were things that I chose to read, outside of school, and perhaps that added to the attraction and longevity.
Chris Moore's "The Stupidest Angel, 2.0," every December since 2005 - 'cause nothing says Christmas like zombies. Also enjoy re-reading my fave Georgette Heyer books (today, it was "The Convenient Marriage," because I just can't resist a hilariously funny Georgian romance featuring a heroine who stutters).
Some Dark Romantic
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