December 14, 2022

Daily Diary, Day 834: My Favorite Thing #8

My next favorite thing is to reread certain books.

This habit of rereading books started when I was about five, and my parents read me books by Kate Seredy, who wrote a number of books for children set in both Hungary and the United States, during the period between WWI and WWII. My favorites were The Good Master and The Singing Tree, The Open Gate, and The Chestry Oak.

The family lore is that I essentially taught myself to read so that I wouldn’t have to wait for my parents to read the next chapter of one of these books. I don’t know how many times I’ve reread them, and simply writing about them has given me the desire to pull them off my shelves and reread them. I suspect that may have been the root of my eventual decision to become an historian.

Then in my early teens, an older cousin gave me my first Regency Romance by Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. At one point, I owned very single one of them, and I certainly reread my favorites every year, for decades. My favorites are A Civil Contract, Friday’s Child, Cotillion, Devil’s Cub, The Grand Sophy, Frederika …. Ok, I’ll stop there!

But in those same years, I also discovered Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest series, which I also reread religiously every year through high school and college.

Then, in graduate school, I was introduced to the Golden Age mystery authors who wrote between WWI and WWII. When I was younger, I had read a number of Agatha Christie mysteries, the most prolific of that group, but it was Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, and Dorothy Sayers that I loved to love the most. I am currently enjoying revisiting some of these books as audiobooks, but I will continue to want to occasionally reread (not listen to) Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane-Peter Whimsey mysteries, especially Gaudy Night, and Josephine Tey’s Brat Farrar.

It was in this period, the 70s and 80s, that I also started reading contemporary mystery series by women authors like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky (the main male exceptions were Tony Hillerman and Dick Francis), and I pretty much bought, in hardback, every new book by these authors that came out.

However, in most cases, I seldom had a desire to reread the ones I had read. Part of the reason for this may have simply been how busy I was as a new mother, embarking on my career. There simply wasn’t time to reread books before a new one came out.

But there were a select few authors whose series were I always took the time to reread. Every time a new book came out, I reread the all the other books in the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, the Mary Russel-Sherlock Holmes series, and Deborah Crombie’s detective series.

And while I don’t do this as anymore with these authors, again because I am too busy—in this case trying to get out the next installment in my own book series—I still make an effort to get the newest books by King and Crombie soon after they are published, albeit as ebooks or audiobooks.

There are still two authors that reread all their prior books when a new one comes out, and that William Gibson's science fiction books and CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series.

So why, given my limited time, and the vast number of new books I could be reading, have I always gotten such pleasure out of rereading books? On the surface, you would think that it would be particularly counter-sintuitive to reread books like mysteries and action-adventure science fiction when there is no longer the tension and surprise of the plot to pull me along.

Looking back at the list of books above, I think I can say the common denominators have always been that these authors did such a good job in world building creating characters I love to spend time with. A good plot was and is part of why I continue to read new books by certain authors, but the specifics of--who did it, or how the protagonists got out of the spot of bother they are in or overcame the obstacles to true love--are of secondary importance to me.

It was the world of Regency England that no one did better a better job of creating than Heyer and her individual characters like Freddy Standen in Cotillon that I fell in love with and want to revisit time and again. I like all of McCaffreys books, but it was the unique world of Pern, its dragons, and characters who evolved through the series, that kept me coming back and rereading the books. It is the way that Crombie invokes so many different areas and time periods in England, and the unique personalities of her two main protagonists and their friends and families that make me anxious to spend time again with them when the new book comes out (and when I have time, reread one of the earlier books.

And, with Cherryh in particular, I can’t imagine anything more fun than spending as much time as possible in the world she has created. Rereading her books always make me feel as if I have come home to spend a couple of hours with people I have grown truly to love.

Needless to say, I would love to hear if you have certain books you enjoy rereading!