Life, Writing, Weirdness

I haven’t done a lot of re-reads in recent years. Okay, decades. There was a time that wasn’t true. As a teenager, I didn’t have a lot of extra money, so I was very picky about books I paid money for and made extensive use of libraries, both public and school. Things I loved were re-read often.

Even in my 20s, when I wasn’t making much money (not that I have all that much disposable income these days, really), I still did quite a few rereads. Fewer, because I spent a big chunk of that decade and the early part of the next working in book retail. I made heavy use of the 30% employee discount.

But as I slipped further into adulthood, my personal library grew and rereads stretched out. There was a time when I read The Lord of the Rings once a year, often if not always prefaced by The Hobbit.

I still have most of the books I’ve ever purchased or been given, and while it’s true that the vast majority of them will never be re-read by me, for a true bibliophile having the book is very nearly as good as reading it.

2025 has mainly been a read whatever the heck I want to year and I kind of put the long-term quest to read all of the novel-length English language award winners on hold. 2026 will be a bit similar but instead, a year of re-reads. There are stories and series that stand out in my mind from earlier days and I want to revisit at least some of them.

Now, I haven’t always had great experiences with revisiting the media of my youth. Some things are better left in memory, as I very much discovered with The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Sometime in the intervening years, I grew to hate unlikeable main characters. It’s fine if they have flaws and it’s preferable that they’re less than perfect in every way, but I need to have something to like about a character, and I didn’t find that about Thomas in Lord Foul’s Bane, so couldn’t continue on from there. I’ve had similar experiences with movies and television, “Well, that wasn’t nearly as good as I remember.”

But I’ve had the opposite experience, too. As part of the Award Winners Quest, I’ve read things I loved as a much younger SF/F fan and have been glad to revisit them (I also found things that I could have discovered during the same time periods and somehow didn’t but enjoyed just as much). I’m hoping that a lot of what I’m picking to start with for this year will hold up well.

Because I tend to overdose on things easily these days, I’m going to rotate through a few series, going one volume at a time and see how things go. Here are the six series I’m going to work on. Several of them are shorter, so I may have to decide on some substitutes to keep things fresh. There are enough books here to get me through the year, I expect.

• Discworld
• Spellsinger
• The Belgariad
• The Dragonriders of Pern
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• The Vorkosigan Saga

I will probably sprinkle in a few stand-alone novels throughout the year, too, and here I’m thinking of some favourite authors who don’t/didn’t typically write in series veins like Guy Gavriel Kay, early Heinlein, Andre Norton, and others. There are a couple of other series that may sneak in, at least the earlier books. We’ll see how things go.

A note on The Belgariad: I am aware of the child abuse convictions of David Eddings and his wife in 1970 but didn’t learn of that until well after his death. I hope the children, whose identities have been kept out of things, have had better lives than they experienced with those adoptive parents. If it was something I’d learned about as a teenager when I first read the books, would it have made a difference to my enjoyment of them? I don’t know if I have enough of a recollection of who I was in those days to know for certain. I can absolutely say that if I knew anything about it, I wouldn’t start reading them today. I don’t believe in separating the art from the artist, but I am able to treat things as a dividing line. I can read and, I hope, enjoy The Belgariad, now because I first read and enjoyed it long before I knew about it. I wouldn’t be able to purchase and read something by the Eddings that I didn’t already own. My support is no longer possible and hasn’t been since I learned about things. Similarly, I can’t watch a Woody Allen movie I haven’t already seen and enjoyed (not that there were many) or enjoy anything Bill Cosby did after about 1999 (and that show was really only funny because of Madeline Kahn most of the time).

Okay, that was a side long note, but when this posts I’ll have already dived into the first couple of books (because still I have a hard time reading only one things at a time). 2026 has begun and so has the new reading adventure, or maybe a series of old ones.

Be well, everyone.