Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, featuring a different top 10 theme each week. This week’s topic is Books I’m Worried I Might Not Love as Much the Second Time Around.
I do love a good re-read when it comes to favorite books, and many books feel even richer or more emotional with each new visit.
Because my rereading experiences tend to be positive, I’m feeling a little puzzled by this week’s topic. I don’t particularly worry about whether I’ll love a book the 2nd time around. I mean, if I loved it originally — enough to want to re-read — then I’m open to however I might experience it upon rereading.
Still, after some pondering, I managed to come up with a few I might be a teeny bit hesitant about as re-reads:
1. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: I read this book as a teen and got swept up in the romance, but I’m guessing I’d have a much harder time with the content if I reread it as an adult.
2. Dune by Frank Herbert: I loved this back in my college days… but had much less experience with science fiction and fantasy at that point in my life. I wonder if I might find it all a bit dense and pretentious if I read it now.
3. Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny: Similar to the item above — this was one of my early introductions to complex fantasy world-building, and I was totally enthralled. I have a feeling I’d love it still, but who knows? This is one I do intend to re-read at some point.
4. The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss: This was my very first romance novel, read as a fairly innocent teen, so I found it shocking and super intriguing. I’d guess that, except for the sake of nostalgia, I’d find it fairly awful now, but at the time… wow!
5. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: I mean, I absolutely loved this book at the time, and in fact, read it straight through twice in a row. And yet, looking at it through today’s lens, too many interactions between the characters seems a little too uncomfortably close to grooming. That didn’t strike me while reading the book, but watching the recent TV series adaptation (which was not good), it all started feeling a bit icky.
That’s all I could think of at the moment, but I’ll add these two, which I actually did re-read recently — and did not have a great time with:
1. Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice: I absolutely swooned over this book the first time around. Last year, I decided to listen to the audiobook… and was so disappointed. Maybe it was the narrator, but the broody inner monologues just seemed to go on and on and on. Not fun.
2. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #2) by Douglas Adams: I suspect this was a matter of timing. I decided to do an audio re-read of the series (I’d previously read books 1 – 3, many years ago) and had a lot of fun with the first audiobook. This 2nd one just didn’t work for me — but I may have been too distracted by real life at the time to appreciate the silliness. Still, it was enough of a washout that I haven’t been all that eager to push on and try the 3rd.
What books are you worried about rereading? Have you had any rereading experiences that were disappointing?
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