Thread: Read the Same Book Multiple Times?
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Old 05-13-2014, 04:17 AM   #66
Rev. Bob
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Quote:
Originally Posted by delph View Post
I read these days for relaxation and to stimulate my imagination with new fodder, and very occasionally for mindless entertainment. For the second reason, I tend to enjoy devouring new books. But there are those times when I want my old favorites. I mentally call them my old friends; I think they're actually better described as 'comfort food' books. I turn to those books when I'm excessively stressed or feeling under the weather.
I call it my "contact poison" shelf.

Those are the books that I have to be extremely careful with. If I look at the shelf and let my eye rest too long on a CP book's spine, I'll find myself remembering how much I enjoyed a particular scene. Next thing I know, I've taken the book down to find that scene, so I can see exactly how something played out...and then I'm rereading the whole thing. If it's part of a series, I count myself lucky if I manage to stop at the end of that one book.

Just about everything Heinlein wrote - with a few notable exceptions - is on that shelf. So are Clarke and Niven's short story collections, Asprin's Myth and Phule books, Spider Robinson's Callahan books, and Stephen King's It. None of King's other books, although I've read just about all of 'em - but I have to reread It about every couple of years. There's something about the combination of detail, plot, and sheer mastery of construction that keeps me coming back...and the first reading took me six days, while I was in high school and thus busy with homework and classes.

On the seventh day, I rested.

I generally find that a reread works best if my memory has faded just enough that I remember the juicy parts a few pages ahead of time, so I can savor the setup and the execution. That also means that the lesser details have faded enough to catch me by surprise, either because I've forgotten them completely or I remember them but forgot they happened here instead of later on.

In the book I'm writing, I'm aiming for it to reward two rereads. The first should illuminate the foreshadowing and let you piece together some background that isn't obvious the first time around, and the second is so you can go through it hunting for Easter eggs and subtle pop-culture references. A once-only reader won't be lost and should be entertained, but they won't get all the juice out of the orange. (For instance, I'm tossing in hints about a character's heritage, but they won't get described until about halfway through the book...by which point, I expect that the reader will have formed a mental image that will probably be wrong. On a reread, though, they should be able to see that the clues were there all the time.)

The funny thing about that is, I'm writing in what's usually seen as a disposable genre, something you read once, with low expectations, and then forget about. I'm making a deliberate decision to aim higher and subvert that pattern, in the same way that modern comic books are a more complex form than the single-issue stories of the '60s and '70s. I just hope I can pull it off.
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