On Reading My Favorite Books:

First off I will tell you I am a re-reader. I go back and read books I like over again and some of them more then once. It started in my childhood when we didn’t have a lot of books in the house. So I would re-read the books I already owned and had read. This lead to a discovery. Some of the books I thought I loved was not because of the story itself but because how the story fit into what was going on in my life at the time. Other books kept on giving me new insights with each reading. And those were the ones I really love the most.

This reading is of course in addition to reading other books in between, during, and around them. Like say, all the Harry Potter books again when each new volume came out. Or when I took to studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, Biblical and others last year. (And with the Old Testament in the other hand. I’m more then half way through that now.) Plus any other books of interest or need for information I come across. And this doesn’t count all of the proof reading I do to the stories I have written and are writing, changing, fixing, or finishing. Also the blogs I read regularly. You get the picture I like to read.

Today I have reached a bench mark. I have read all of the Valdemar Series by Mercedes Lackey. I would read them as I found the money to buy them, a trilogy here, a single volume there, over a six year period. My son turned me on to them a few months before he died. But when I started my cancer treatments I went out and bought all the ones I still didn’t own by then for myself. And I started re-reading them from the very beginning. The pre history through to the end.

(She started with the first trilogy and after questions from her faithful readers added the other books on the history and still more books on the back lives of some of the people in the first books. Along with the rest of the story into the future of the land.)

I love most all of them. And today I closed the back cover on the twenty sixth volume. Oh, and there are also the four Anthologies in there too so that makes an even thirty. I will visit them again some day but for now I am on to other things to read and places to go on the white wings of the printed page. A happy/sad day for me.

Now go find yourself a good book to read or even re-read one.