How often do you go back an reread a book? Although I’ve read alot of books over the years, as time goes on, I find that while I remember the major/minor plot lines, I often forget the little details — especially the dialog.
Douglas Adams is one of the authors that you can always reread. The way he describes objects and writes dialog has a kind of ‘going off on a tangent, while maintaining your interest and causing you to laugh’ feel.
I haven’t read Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency in about 15 years. Right now I’m rereading it (actually listening to it on audio-book).
Here’s the kind of passages that make Douglas Adams uniquely Douglas Adams.
`Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery…
Even the skeptical mind must be prepared to accept the unacceptable when there is no alternative. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands.
groggy
I go back and read stuff pretty often. There are some books that I just really like, and I find a year or perhaps two is sufficient for me to forget huge portions of the plot..and many details. I’ve read some things 3 or 4 times.
and today is the 100th birthday of Robert A Heinlien (at least according to http://www.userfriendly.org) … I feel a touch of “have spacesuit will travel” … though I have to get it out of the library first.
I reread books all the time. I have read the Hobbit about 7 times in the last 25 years. Others keep coming back for more too. Not just the classics either. Since our conversation around your picnic table Saturday night I feel the pull of the Xanth series and also the Anthony books on the Incarnation of Immortality may be making a comeback too.
I can’t get into Douglas Adams. I should like him, but I just couldn’t get past the first chapter of Hitchhiker’s.
I reread lots of books: LotR, the Pern books, Melanie Rawn’s stuff, The Secret Garden (yes, the children’s book), Heinlein…
Myself and some other relatives of the MA “Zoo” have tried to email you and your [not] better half and both your (forwarded to comcast) emails appear to be down????
Note: a “[” in geek-dom means consider the word enclosed in brackets as optional (i.e. either include it … or … not)
I reread the good ones several times. For the fun series with lots of subtle details (and in-jokes) like Asprin’s M.Y.T.H. books or Brust’s Vlad Taltos books, I find I like to reread the whole series, often in a completely different order than I did the last time around.
Last night I proved once again that I can’t be trusted with chapter books. I was up well past my allotted reading time, unable to put the bloody book down.
It was an outage on my bachen.com domain. Apparently my mail host’s SMTP server was blacklisted by Comcast because of spam (probably another account on the server). So since we had our email forwarding turned on, it instead bounced.
I was aware of it as of 9am yesterday morning, and had it fixed by early afternoon.. so all is well now.
That’s always the sign of a good book. I haven’t read any MYTH books in close to 15 years.. I wonder if I still have them upstairs in the library… maybe I’ll go check later… wonder if they ever made them into audio books…