Old Favorites

A while back, I read a discussion about keeper books. The question was do you ever go back and reread them, and the answer, for most, was no. Weird, I thought, but after considering it a while, I realized I agreed.

One of the first romances I ever read -- like tons of other authors -- was Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss. I loved that book. It's been more years than I'll admit to her, but I still remember the characters' names, details, etc. Damn, it was something!

But when Robert was stationed at Camp Lejeune, I met regularly for dinner with a couple of writer friends, Judith and Sandy. One night they invited another friend of theirs, another writer, of course, to join us. She'd come more recently to romances than the rest of us and had never read Shanna. We raved about it so much that she scrounged up a copy of the book, read it, and was appalled. Let's face it -- early-day heroes were assholes and heroines were often spoiled, whiny and/or weak.

To see if she was faulty or my memory was, I dug out my old keeper copy, read a few chapters and put it away. It wasn't as good as I remembered. In fact, I've never been able to think of the book the same way since. F*ck.

I'll reread a book that I really liked -- remember, I just reread all six Harry Potters (nope, haven't read #7 yet; it's going to be a reward for getting some other stuff done). But I won't reread the books on my keeper shelves. I loved every one of those books dearly. If the story or the writing doesn't live up to my memory of it, I don't want to know. I just want to look it and remember how damn much I enjoyed it the first time I read it.

Where's winter???






Rachel4:25 PM