A month or two ago I came across a blogger who wrote on the subject of re-reading. I really enjoyed what she had to say on the subject and it reminded me that I had written a post on the subject myself back in '18. Given how many of you weren't around then, it seemed like a great idea to repost this. I'm also including a link to Sustainabilitea's Post:
Let's Talk Books...Do You Reread?
Obviously this is a vast and intricate subject, full of nuances and personal interpretations overlapped by moods, tastes and general things that most Bookworms can identity with. As such, most bloggers will treat said subject with the care and respect it is due and take into account the fact they have a myriad of followers with as many opinions as the stars.
Hahahahahaa! Like I care two-bits about what ANY of you think? Here's the double dukes to you sensitive snowflakes:
Ok, with that out of my system, I think I'm ready to move forward here for real. I've been seriously into re-reading since 2016, when I began my organized Project Re-Read plan. That was a "short experiment" of 1 year to see if I could regularly re-read books and still enjoy them. It was such a smashing success that I expanded it to almost 1/5 of my total reading now. Given, I'm picking mostly series that I seem to remember enjoying before, but overall, it is going very well.
Before 2016's Project, I'd re-read favorite books at random. I didn't give it any thought, it was almost all standalone books and it was very impulsive. Once I started seriously organizing my reading schedule, it was much easier to plugin whole series that I wanted to re-read and simply make them a part of the rotation. I explain my whole system in excruciating detail in The TBR Tag.
But with so many books coming out (thousands every year, even just in the genres I read) and me reading less than 200 a year, why do I re-read? I will separate the reasons and expound upon each accordingly.
1 ) The more I read, the more crap I come across
I read voraciously and need a steady influx to sate me. I could take a chance on Brand New Indie Author X, but I've been burned so many times doing that that I'm rather bitter actually. Seriously, if I can avoid 25-50 crap books by not experimenting with new to me authors but instead read books that have already given me hours of enjoyment, where's the downside? I don't read JUST for new experience, although that certainly plays its part, but also for enjoyment.
2 ) Life beats the crap out of me sometimes
Sometimes I simply need to pull away and put my mind into a big cozy comforter of a story. Some place where big ugly baldy there can't get to me.
3 ) A New Perspective
As I get older, my tastes change, my thought processes change and my perspective changes. What I think about romance now is quite different from what I thought in my early 20's. A great almost two decades of marriage will do that! I'm a lot more empathetic in some ways and in other ways, I'm a lot less willing to put up with plot drama for plot drama's sake. Life experience has shown me how shallow teens are and how shallow those books are. It's not bad, just like a picture book isn't a bad thing for a toddler, but I don't expect a 14 year old to be reading a cardboard picture book, nor do I expect a 50 year old to be subsisting on most modern ya. As I grow older I highly suspect I'll be wanting my protagonists to grow older with me. Whether that actually happens or not, I can't say.
4 ) Gleaning More Meaning
Once I have mowed the whole field and gotten in the harvest, a re-read allows me to go back over the book and pick out those little things I couldn't see the first time around. Maybe I was too busy trying to figure out what was going on, or maybe I was just trying to keep track of all 47 characters and the 32 various plots initially. Whatever the reason, a re-read allows me to gather up the smaller patches of things that I simply couldn't that first time around. A good book will have a great number of things for one to glean upon every re-read.
That pretty much sums up the reasons why I re-read. I used my words, ALL my words.
ps,
please do visit and comment on Sustainabilitea's Post. I really want to show her how much I appreciate being reminded of this issue.
pps,
She asked two questions, so I thought I'd ask them here too.
- Do you re-read?
- If you do re-read, what book or series do you re-read?
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