Book Blogger Hop
This prompt was submitted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer:
Have you ever reread a book? If so, why did you decide to reread it?
Have I ever? There’ve been times in my life when re-reading was the majority of my reading. Thankfully, a better library, a larger budget, and the occasional book in exchange for a review have prevented that from being the case lately.
Sometimes, I re-read because I have nothing else on hand to read (it’s been ages since this has been an issue). Sometimes it’s because I need to refresh my memory before a new installment of a series comes out and I want to get the last book or two in my mind as a refresher. Sometimes it’s because I didn’t understand something the first time—or I need to review the material in general (I’m thinking primarily of non-fiction books here). But the primary reason I re-read is that I liked the book and want to experience it again.
A lot of it is the comfort of returning to a world and characters that I liked—when I get sick, for example, a quick visit to the Brownstone on West 35th Street* does as much good as chicken noodle soup. Or it’s the writing—the wordplay of Ellen Raskin or Gregory Mcdonald always makes me smile. Or just to relive the story—I could give too many examples here.
* That’d be Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin books.
Sadly, I really don’t have that much time anymore to re-read and I miss it. I feel a little guilty that I’m not reading something I can blog about when I do that (sure, sometimes I do talk about re-reads, but it’s not often)—and even without the guilt, I just don’t have the time. Largely, that’s what I use audiobooks for now.
Are you a one-and-done type of reader, or do you keep circling back?
Bob Germaux
I’m a serial re-reader. I’ve probably read every Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker several times over the years, and I’ve read Frank McCourt’s “Teacher Man” two or three times, just because I love his style of writing, plus the fact that his experiences teaching in inner-city New York are so similar to mine in inner-city Pittsburgh schools. Also, and this is rather self-serving, I occasionally re-read some of my own works. For instance, before beginning a new Jeremy Barnes mystery, I’ll often go back and re-read one of the earlier JB books, just to submerge myself in the narrative flow, as it were, of JB’s world. Finally, I have to admit that I have once or twice re-read another of my books, “Love Stories,” because it is a semi-biographical novel based on my wife’s experiences when she was seventeen years old and spent six weeks in Europe (and kept a detailed daily journal). I love reading about my wife before I met her, along with the fictional narrative that I created in which one of the boys she met that summer suddenly reappears in her life after twenty years of silence. A final note: re-reading books allows me to escape this world for a while and spend time with old friends in that other world, the fictional one.
HCNewton
“A final note: re-reading books allows me to escape this world for a while and spend time with old friends in that other world, the fictional one.”
Exactly!