I think I talked about it in my post on trilogies, but I am a big re-reader.

I love delving into a book or series every few years to revisit favorite characters and favorite relationships, to see how my reading experience changes as I do, or to remind myself of previous books in a series before I tackle the newest one.

When the stay-at-home order for COVID-19 was put in place in Mass, I immediately began re-reading some of my favorite series. To be fair, I prefer reading paper books and the library was closed, so I had to re-read what I already owned.

The whole experience got me thinking about why I re-read and which books I tend to re-read. I find that I often turn to books that helped shaped my teenage years and books that contain my favorite “book boyfriends.” As a 32 year-old reader, I hold no more naivety about the idealism of fictional relationships, but that doesn’t mean I cannot read them anymore.

Books that I have re-read over the years:
1. The Ringmaster’s Secret by Carolyn Keene (my favorite of the Nancy Drew books)
2. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (I read this book for the first time in 2000 and I have read it every few years since. One year, when I was in my early twenties, I hated it. It has been with me for a long time)
3. Meg Cabot’s Heather Wells series (Ex-pop star works at a college dorm and solves murders with a hunky PI. Yes please. The first one is called Size 12 is Not Fat and I was one then,)
4. Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries Series (such fun teen angst)
5. Phillip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series
6. Deanna Rayburn’s Veronica Speedwell Series
7. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
8. Emma by Jane Austen
9. The Collected Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
10. Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices series
11. Harry Potter (up until this year)
12. Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery (until after Anne and Gilbert get married and Anne’s character changes completely)
13. The Murder of Roget Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
14. All of Dan Brown’s books (they are fun and I don’t care what you think)

I’m sure there are many that I am forgetting, but no matter what, re-reading is an important part of my literary life. Sometimes I crave the comfort of a story that I know the ending of. Sometimes I need to swoon over a hero. Sometimes I have to see how a text has aged and how I have aged with it.

Why do you re-read? What do you find yourself re-reading? I would love to know!