I started re-reading The Princess Bride this week. I love re-reading books: I always pick up on little details I’d forgotten, or nuances I hadn’t picked up before. Sometimes I realize I’d forgotten major details and it is like reading a whole new book! I know my mom experiences the whole new book phenomenon almost every time she re-reads something because she can’t remember a story once she’s finished. It is very frustrating to talk to her about what she’s reading because once she’s put the book down she has no idea. Just this weekend we were at Nana’s for dinner and when mom announced she’d finally finished her book, she wasn’t able to tell dad anything about how it ended; less than twenty four hours after finishing she’d completely forgotten the plot! She always ends up accidentally re-reading books because she can’t remember if she knows the story.
On the other end of the spectrum I have a very good friend who never re-reads books; he buys books, reads them once, then keeps them like trophies (sometimes he buys books he’s already read but didn’t own just to have the trophy). It’s odd and it’s more than slightly distressing; maybe it’s because he’s Dutch. It is one of the few issues we just can’t come to any sort of agreement on. Not re-reading a single book that you didn’t particularly care for is fine, not re-reading any book ever as a policy is downright weird. I don’t plan re-read every book I’ve ever read, reading new books is exciting too. Most of what I read are new-to-me books, but I just can’t understand people who won’t read a book again, it’s like eating mac and cheese and saying “well, that was good, but as a matter of policy I’ll never eat it again”.
Back to The Princess Bride, I’d forgotten how much I love this book! I suppose I should thank my Tasmania friends, since they had someone do a reading from this book at their wedding. I’d been thinking I really should re-read it, but listening some random man dressed as Miracle Max read from it in a tent in a paddock in Tasmania really brought home just how much I need to re-read it now. So here I am, re-reading it. The way things are currently going I might very well re-read it again as soon as I finish. It has certainly been nice to read a bit of comfort literature after discovering the author of the last book I read primarily writes romance novels.
Just before the re-read started I finished a YA steampunk novel (the best description was the Goodreads review that called it “a bookish chimera”) which I enjoyed, even though it had a few irritating points. The most irritating point came in the form of a wholly unnecessary time traveling character (time travel, really? you’ve already got Sherlock’s niece (Mycroft has a child? really?), Bram Stoker’s little sister, a cult that worships an Egyptian goddess, all set in a steampunk alternate history–do you really need to add unnecessary time travel into the mix?). Now, I could get past the time travel thing (though I think the author had covered pretty much every other possible thing currently popular in YA fiction and would have been justified in leaving out something) had it not broken one of Mark Twain’s 19 rules governing fiction. To be specific, it oblivionized rule 4, which states “that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.” The time traveler did not, in my mind, exhibit sufficient reason for being there (there are quite a few other members of Goodreads who share my opinion on this). Perhaps he will justify his existence in the sequel; equally appealing is the idea that he will be sent back to future or simply killed off, thus ridding the story of it’s least agreeable feature.
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