There’s still no official themes from The Broke and the Bookish, so this week I’m going to cover rereads — the books that, for me, have been tested to destruction. Not all of them are books I love right now; some are books I read to bits as a kid (and which I should maybe look at reading again?).
- The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff. This used to be a favourite. It’s still a book I love very much, if not a favourite exactly. I just love the way Sutcliff took a real weird event (the discovery of a Roman Eagle) and wove a story around it.
- The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Well, of course. What else did you expect, from me?
- Strong Poison, by Dorothy L. Sayers. If Sayers’ writing ever gets old for me, that’s when I’m done living, I think.
- The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison. The most recent addition to the list, but one I’m confident will stick around. I just… I love pretty much everything about it.
- The Winter King, by Bernard Cornwell. This is probably the only portrayal of Galahad I’ve ever loved, and sadly you don’t see many Galahads like him. Arthur’s pretty great, too, and it all feels… real and possible. A great interpretation of the Arthurian myth, even if sometimes it stretches.
- The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper. I didn’t actually read this as a child — I was probably 16 when I finally read it. But the BBC audio adaptation was seriously formative.
- The Positronic Man, by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. I think my copy has vanished again, but when I was about nine or ten, I had a copy out of the library (on my mother’s library card, because they wouldn’t let me borrow adult books). I think the fine I ran up with this book alone had to be the worst I’ve ever incurred — and I got some pretty steep ones as a student.
- The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Oh my goodness, I read at least two copies to death.
- The Railway Children, by Edith Nesbit. Also this one. It made me briefly consider watching trains as a child, one boring summer. Of course, the lack of train tracks anywhere too nearby put a damper on that.
- The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay. In fact, pretty much everything by Guy Gavriel Kay, since I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently.
So what about you? What do you read and read and reread?
I think we’ve bonded before over shared love of some of these books 🙂 I would love to get a reread of Eagle of the Ninth in (maybe that trilogy will be my treat to myself when I get home from this assignment) – but my copy is already well-battered from the many, many rereads it has had since I was first given it as a kid. TDiR is on that list of lifelong rereads for me too, and while I haven’t made a habit of rereading The Secret Garden I did adore it when I revisited it a couple of years back (…and I suspect the same would be true of Nesbit – I never read The Railway Children, but I loved the Psammead trilogy and The Enchanted Castle).
…and now you’ve inspired me to borrow this tag. So I won’t talk about any others, I’ll write a post for next week 😉
imyril recently posted…The Expanse Read-along: Caliban’s War – Week 1
I’ll look forward to that, then!
There is a linky up for TTT for adding posts but not many have discovered it yet! LOTR was a favourite as a kid but I never did go on to read a lot of fantasy!
chucklesthescot recently posted…Top Ten Tuesday
Huh, I missed that. Thanks!