November 23, 2023: My Favorite Things #5

Sending Thanksgiving good wishes, and one of My Favorite Things--Rereading Books

Daily Diary, Day 1178:

Photo by Brad Switzer on Unsplash

Today, my goal for this Thanksgiving is to take a day off, which primarily means giving myself the time to finish reading the latest CJ Cherryh novel in her Foreigner series. Cherryh is one of the few authors I take the time to read a new book by, and even so, since this is the 22nd book in this series, it is like revisiting an old favorite. So, I decided that I would repost an updated the My Favorite Things piece from last year on why most of my reading (and listening to audiobooks) is spend re-reading certain books and authors.

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 once again. I suspect that these particular books were what inspired me to eventually decide 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! Update: It is no accident that I have just listened to an audiobook edition of Devil’s Cub

But in those same high school 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 college and beyond.

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 was now discovering and falling in love with. 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 of my life, 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. Update: This past year I have listened to Hillerman, Paretsky, and just finished a Dick Francis.

But there were a select few authors whose series I loved so much that I always took the time to reread their books, every time a new book came out to get back into the world and build up my anticipation for the newest one. This was true of the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, the Mary Russel-Sherlock Holmes series, and Deborah Crombie’s detective series.

Perhaps because I have become so busy in the past 10 years writing my own books, I no longer take the time to do this with these authors, I will 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 several authors that I routinely reread all their books, just for the fun of it. Interestingly, they are all science fiction writers: William Gibson, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and CJ Cherryh.

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-intuitive 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 and 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? how is the protagonists going to get out of the spot of bother they are in? and how are the the obstacles to true love going to be over come?--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 favorite books or authors you enjoy rereading over and over! And for those of you in the US, Happy Thanksgiving!

In case you aren’t sure how you got here, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. This is my newsletter reflecting on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. If you would like to subscribe or become a patron (nothing goes behind a paywall, you just get to know I can spend more time writing and less time marketing if you decide to do so), you can subscribe or upgrade by clicking the little button below. If you enjoyed this post, please do click on the heart and/or share with your friends, and I always welcome comments! Thanks!