To Re-read Or Not To Re-read…

… That is the question.

I haven’t had as many reviews to post lately because I’ve been doing a lot of re-reading. I re-read both Gone Girl and This Is Where I Leave You in preparation for the movies and then I re-read Slant of Light to prep for reading the sequel, This Old World.

Because my memory is so terrible, I try to re-read the book that a movie is based on before I see the movie if it’s been more than a few months since I read the book originally. I do this mostly so that I can write a detailed Page To Screen post. I didn’t do much re-reading of books turned movies before my blog. I have a friend who says that she prefers not to re-read the book so that she won’t notice every little detail of how the book is different and can just sit back and enjoy the movie. Of course if there are huge discrepancies, she’ll still notice. I can definitely see the advantage of not re-reading to avoid being disappointed.

Again, because of my terrible memory, when a new book in a series comes out, I try to re-read at least the immediate previous book in the series to refresh myself on what was happening with the series. Usually, if I read a book twice then I do a much better job of remembering what happened in it so I don’t have to re-read EVERY book in the series every time a new one comes out. For this reason,  in the case of series that have a set number of books determined at the outset, like trilogies, I’ll wait until all the books are released before starting the series so that I can read them all in quick succession, thus avoiding re-reading. I even did this with the Twilight series believe it or not. I resisted the hype for as long as I could!

The last type of re-reading is re-reading books just because they are favorites. I have rarely done this. In fact, I can’t remember doing it at all as an adult reader. Sometimes I will listen to a book I have previously read on audio though. There are just so many books and so little time that I can’t justify re-reading to myself in that case. What if I don’t read all the books before I die because I spent time re-reading?!

What are your thoughts on re-reading?

November 17th, 2014 in Books
  • http://rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com rhapsodyinbooks

    I almost always have to re-read stuff, like if I’m doing a trilogy. I hate that I have to, but I do think you enjoy series more that way, and movies from books.

  • Average Jane

    There are certain books that I re-read over and over. Those go in the permanent collection.

    I recently re-read the first four “Outlander” books to refresh my memory and see where there TV series was headed. I’ll probably eventually re-read all the “Game of Thrones” books as well.