Rereading

Do you reread favourite books much?

I know that some of my most valuable and treasured reading is actually rereading. Most of my reading time is about the constant search for something new, something wonderful and something I haven't found yet. But some of the best times ever are spent returning to favourites.

The recent blog posts about World Book Day - and seeing photos of various people's favourite books from when they were kids has made me determined to pick out a heap of children's books for rereading.  i seem to have picked out the round number of nine...

Just looking at this heap of stuff - there are things here that are long overdue revisiting. Sylvia Waugh's modern classic 'The Mennyms'! Turns out that it's a full twenty years since i first read this novel. (It's about a secretive and possibly non-human family living quietly in a house somewhere in a North Eastern town. I won't give away their true nature here.)

I often write my name and the date I read a book on the first page - and so I know that I last read Michael Ende's 'The Neverending Story' twelve years ago. That's much too long a gap without returning - so on the heap it goes!

As a kid i never read E.L Konigsburg and so it was only in recent years Stuart Douglas told me about 'From the Mixed-up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler' - about the two kids who run away from home and camp out in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It turns out that was five years ago, and I need to go back to it to appreciate again how brilliant Konigsburg is.

Pamela Sykes' spooky and strange 'Come Back, Lucy' was a find from last year - but I knew I would be rereading it before long...

Some of the others I haven't read since I was actually a kid - those Cave Monsters, those insects aboard the giant airborne peach... and that adventure on Mystery Moor!

This feels like a little bit of a holiday coming up. A holiday into the past...