Annuals, Perrinials, and Immortals

Wherein the Writer Describes his Special Relationship with certain books worthy of Re-reading, discusses such relationships in General, and Enumerates Specifics of his own Preferences 

You a big reader? Yeah, I figured.

Okay,  imagine this with me. Imagine that for every time you ever re-read a book, you instead had picked up something new. How many more books would you have read by now? Dozens? Hundreds?

Just chew that over for a minute. How many more stories would you have in your head? How many more worlds would you have visited? How many new loves, new heartbreaks, new laughs?

It doesn't matter, of course. The ones you love you revisit, I don't care who you are. Life without re-reading would be like limiting your romantic engagements to first dates only. Kind of.

I am a big re-reader. The biggest barrier to me being as well read as I would like is my going back to certain books constantly.

There are some books that I revisit so often that I have created categories for them in my mind: Annuals, Perennials, and Immortals.

Here is how I break them down, in my mind:

Annuals

I never realized that I had a real Annual list until New Year's Day, 2012. I woke up with a wicked hangover. I had an Alka-Seltzer, made coffee, then got back in bed. When the missus, similarly afflicted, woke up, I suggested that we just stay in bed and get into one of our most frequently watched movies, Tropical Thunder. "After all," I said, goofing, "we haven't seen it since last year."

Ba-dum-dum-TING!

Lying in bed watching one of our favorite comedies was a great way to spend the morning, so we went ahead and queued up all of the other favorites we watch all a time but had not, wink wink, yet watched in 2012. Oh Brother, Where Are Thou?, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, Monty Python's Holy Grail.

While we watched I broke out my notebook, now interested in all of the "once a year" things I'm into. I actually have a special box of once a year CDs, albums that I rarely listen to but like to check out once in a while.

(Just re read the above - am I obsessive? I don't feel obsessive).


Right now my annual list looks like this:

Lonesome Dove, although I stop before my favorite character dies.
Catch 22
Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrel, although I often start with Part II and one year I just read all of the bits about Stephen Black
The Diamond Age

Perennials

A Perennial is a book that I am always reading. 

Dune is my chief perennial. I have three copies of Dune in my home plus a less than satisfactory full cast audiobook. If I see it lying around and I'm not doing anything, I pick it up and read a bit, starting wherever my finger falls. One of my copies of Dune is so broken in that it automatically opens to one of my favorite bits - much like Dr. Yueh's copy of the OC bible.

"I'm Dean Stockwell and I approved this reference."

My newest Perennial is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I listened to the audiobook, fell in love (narrated by Will Wheaton!), and now I listen to it when I've got blues that need chasing away.

Likewise there are books placed strategically around my house for my constant perusal: Hannibal, The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, my many HP Lovecraft collections. I can open them at any time and go right back in, no muss, no fuss.

Immortals

Okay, I admit that looks a bit grandiloquent there on my blog. But lets face it - there are some books that are truly Immortal, and you treat them differently than other works.

For example: The Fellowship of the Ring. If I get it in my head to read The Lord of the Ring's series again its not like picking up my copy of Dune once again and once again opening up to the scene where the Emperor introduces Baron Harkonen to his granddaughter, or flipping to to the part in Catch-22 where Yossarian gets the shit bombed out of him.

The Fellowship . . . that is something different. I take a re-read of The Trillogy seriously. I make special time for it. I don't go out for a cup of coffee with my book . . . I take Tolken. I am reading Tolken, it is a thing that is currently happening in my life. An event. 

The last time I did the whole series was just before Peter Jackson's first adaptation came out. You don't just want to jump right in to a movie take of a favorite series without reading it again, so you can add to the clamor of voices screaming about how you would have done it differently (NB - I thought the first movie trillogy rocked. The Hobbit movies are breaking my heart a bit, although Smaug is truly awesome when he isn't busy getting defeated by a giant gold jello mold some dwarves threw together in, like, four minutes).

"Shyeah, right!" "As if!"

Other Immortals: The Art of War, Stephen King's Christine (Oh, really? Its the classic American horror novel. Come at me bro!),The Tao De Ching, Middlemarch.

And that's it for this week. Good reading!