TSS: Fatty-fat novels and a re-read-a-thon!

Happy Sunday, all!

I’ve decided that I’m going to spend the next month plowing through some of the chunksters in my life, and on my TBR pile. I’ve got a backlog of reviews built up from the read-a-thon (only two left until I’m caught up), so I can read some of the giant, fatty-fat novels that I ostensibly love but have recently been shying away from without having to worry that it’s keeping me from posting.

I’m also planning to couple this with some re-reading, since all of the books I currently need to re-read are also chunksters. I used to re-read books all the time – all the time – but as Ye Olde TBR(e) Pile grew, the amount of re-reading that I did shrunk correspondingly. But I’ve got a memory like a sieve, so I can re-read books and still have them be like new – especially if I’ve only read them once before.

That’s not the case with the re-read I just finished; I’ve read Anne Rice’s The Mummy, or, Ramses the Damned so many times I can’t even count, but that number’s now n + 1. But the other three re-reads are all of books that I’ve only read once each, and that all have sequels that are either recently or soon-to-be published, and so I feel the need to refresh my leaky memory.

I read the first four Earth’s Children books over and over again when I was younger (possibly too young), but I only read The Shelters of Stone once, in 2003, and I remember very little about it, other than that I didn’t like it quite as much as the previous installments, there was a huge cast I had problems keeping straight, less raunchy sex than some of the other ones, and I’m pretty sure Ayla invents religious tolerance.

I read my way through the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series in 2006, but a friend who’s currently reading them for the first time was talking about them, and I realized that while several individual scenes have stayed with me, a lot of the details have completely fled my mind… which is problematic in such a complex and detailed world as Martin’s. I’ll probably re-read the whole series before picking up the new book, but at the very least I want to re-read the first one before I start watching the show.

This one’s kind of embarrassing. It was not that long ago at all that I read The Name of the Wind – less than three years, in fact. Well after the point at which I started including summaries with my reviews, as a means of helping myself remember plot points longer. And then a friend sent me to this summary-of-NotW-via-cartoon on Patrick Rothfuss’s blog… and I read it, and realized that pretty much none of it sounded familiar. And I’d really like to be up to speed before I dive into the big pretty hardcover of Wise Man’s Fear that I got for my birthday.

What about you, readers? What re-reads do you have on your horizon?

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