Books Are Like Vacation Photos

Right now I’m reading a book on rereading. I don’t think I’ll read it again once I finish it. The author, a woman in her 70’s, talks a lot about her own experiences in rereading. She shares how the Alice stories, which she discovered at age six, have read differently and similarly to her over the years. The editor of an annotated edition of Pride and Prejudice, she talks about why so many people revisit the works of Austen annually.

Honestly, I’m not much of a re-reader. Certain friends of mine can find so much amusement in a Terry Pratchett novel that they will finish it on Friday night and start all over again Saturday morning. Perhaps it’s a more active form of how I can watch the same music video several times in week. But a novel requires a much larger time commitment than my four and a half minute Michelle Branch video from the early 2000’s.

The Wizards Harry

With Potter-mania still a force to be reckoned with and my own literary obsessions flitting around as they will, I’ve been thinking about fantasy stories and why I like some and just can’t lose myself in others.  For most of 2010 I read hardly anything that didn’t center around the adventures of a wizard named Harry… Dresden.  Yet whenever I’ve tried to go to Hogworts, whether in book or movie form, to visit with that other wizard named Harry, it’s felt like a chore.

Reading Addictions

My sister, the classical musician, once asked me why I don’t write more frequently. She observed that she plays music all the time—not just for practice, but because she loves it. If I think I’m a writer, shouldn’t I be writing with the same frequency and passion? Well, yes. However, the comparison doesn’t quite hold up. She plays, but she doesn’t compose. Writing is composing. Reading, however, is more like practicing.

Stephen King says that if you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. I think he advocates reading for three or four hours a day, on top of writing 500 to 1,000 words every day. Then again, he’s filthy rich and has a mental twitch that compels him to write in the same way alcoholics are compelled to drink. I’m not the former, and lack the latter.

But I do read. Blissfully free of internet access in my apartment, with a broken DVD player and lots of time on my hands, oh how I read. And while I don’t have a writing addiction, I do tend to get hooked on certain authors or series. Here’s a snapshot of what I’m presently hooked on, after the jump.