Green Tee Readings

Just as I was about to go to sleep, my mind decided to become interested in quantifying how many books I’m likely to read in an average year, counting re-reads. Preliminary guess: 60 to 70, with probably 35 to 40 of them being new. I keep vacillating between declaring those numbers too high and too low, which by some measure means that I have them just right.

I think my re-read count is so high because I there are authors and series that I dearly love and that I’ll fall headfirst into whenever I begin any of the books. A partial list of oft-re-read books:

Guy Gavriel Kay: Sometimes I can stop with just reading either The Sarantine Mosiac duology or The Lions of Al-Rassan, but I’m likely to get sucked into A Song for Arbonne and either Tigana or The Fionavar Tapestry, too.

Lois McMaster Bujold: At the very least Memory and A Civil Campaign get re-read biannually. The rest the Vorkosigan books and the Chalion books are a good bet for a yearly or a slightly past a year re-visit.

Steven Gould: Helm, Jumper, or Reflex will be read within a calendar year, often all three.

Robin McKinley: Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword are a matched pair, if I read one I pretty much have to read the other within two weeks. Sunshine is a constant test of willpower, like a delicious dessert. Within any given 18 month span, I’ll have likely read all three

Robert Charles Wilson: Either The Chronoliths or Spin

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon

Debra Doyle & James MacDonald: I read five of the six Mageworlds books constantly, skipping The Stars Asunder because I don’t own A Working of Stars.

Steven Brust: Since the Vlad Taltos books* take me just over a week to speed through, it’s hard to keep from reading them at least once a year.

Jasper Fforde: Those Thursday Next books are just so damn charming.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance probably averages a biennial re-read from me, as does “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”

Looking at all that: holy shit I read a lot of genre fiction. It’s something I knew, since I generally make it a point to read something else once in a while, but I don’t think I knew my re-reading tendencies were quite that bad. And it makes me very glad I’ve stopped re-reading Robert Jordan almost entirely and decided that Anne McCaffrey wasn’t worth my time anymore; between them there are another twenty books I sometimes re-read every year. Ugh, and David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Raymond E Feist, all of whom I re-read constantly in middle school. It’s sometimes a wonder I have room for anything at all in my brain. I do think it’s probable that To Say Nothing of the Dog and Ha’Penny, by Connie Willis and Jo Walton respectively, are strong contenders for a high re-read rate.

If anyone’s still reading this far into the post, any books that you re-read compulsively that I should give a try? I’d like to slow down rates of burn in; I already don’t cry during GKK books anymore (and those were as bad as Where the Red Fern Grows the first time through), the thought of which kind of makes me sniffle.

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