Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Top Ten Books I Could Re-read Forever


Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Could Re-read Forever

(This is more like 35 books because it's mostly a bunch of series of books.)

1. The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
2. The Space Trilogy (Ransom Trilogy) by C. S. Lewis
3. A Wrinkle in Time and the rest of the Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle
4. The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
5. King Lesserlight's Crown: A Children's Story for Grownups, Too by Charlie W. Starr
6. The Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
7. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
8. The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis
9. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
10. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

And when I say I could re-read these forever, I'm telling you that I actually re-read these books every 2 or 3 years at least! No wonder my TBR pile never shrinks! There are always new books to read but I can't stop returning to these!

But I am in good company. C. S. Lewis wrote the following about the merits and wisdom of re-reading in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
"An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? [...]
We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words. They want to have again the ‘surprise’ of discovering that what seemed Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s grandmother is really the wolf. It is better when you know it is coming: free from the shock of actual surprise you can attend better to the intrinsic surprisingness of the peripeteia.” - C. S. Lewis 



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