Pleasure Reading

The books we return to, over and over again

There are books I have known and loved over the years, seeking out and re-reading again and again. Oddly enough, some old favorites haven’t been re-visited in some time - it’s been years since I drifted away from my annual reading of the Hobbit and LOTR trilogy. Time. I find I don’t read the way I once did.

There was a time I’d come home from the library with an armful of books, and have it done in a week. I measured my days in how many books per day I read. A day without a full book in it was a very busy day, indeed. Now?

Well. I’m not going to say there aren’t days with multiple books in them. They are passing rare, though, and only when I’m too ill to do anything but escape into the portal of pages, curling up under the covers until I’ve recovered enough to take back up my responsibilities. Binging books is a pleasure, when I can indulge.

Most of the time, I work at a book in small sips, and often rotate through non-fiction titles nibbling at dense topics as I can, and taking time to digest the information I’ve taken in. Fiction is… difficult. Reading new fiction requires pathways in my brain that are, for lack of a better way to express this, painful. I tend to retreat onto familiar ground, reaching for favorite books rather than exploring new worlds.

I know I’m not alone in this. Many people have shared their favorites with me. I’d love to hear what yours are. Mine depend on mood. When asked for my favorite book, I’ll freeze up for a moment. I’m thinking. My choice will be guided by the day, the time, the place, and what I’ve been reading recently.

Today? I’ve been re-reading the last of Alma Boykin’s Familiar Generations books, the carry-on from the long-funning Familiars series, a really fun and comforting set of stories that feel like they are old favorites even if they are all less than a decade old. This last week(s)? I’ve been hanging out with an old, old friend, one Albert Campion, a creation of Margery Allingham. I first found him with Tiger in the Smoke, in a tatty paperback at a thrift shop when I was perhaps 14. Which is about the time I made another lifelong friend in the books of Dorothy Sayers’, who remains my all-time favorite author. Busman’s Honeymoon is a book I’ll come back to again and again, with all the satisfaction in a happy ending that is, nonetheless, the realest of all romances: learning to live together.

Next week? Tomorrow? I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead. Also, I have some non-fiction to burrow into, like the book wyrm I am.

How about you? What’s your current comfort? What books do you find draw you back into their warm embrace, and why? What books used to be favorites, and have faded from your memories into will o’ wisp pages of smoke dancing through your subconscious?