The OF Blog: Thinking of doing a re-reading/review series after I finish my latest batch of reviews

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Thinking of doing a re-reading/review series after I finish my latest batch of reviews

Sometime in the next week to 10 days, I'm going to finish the remaining 8 books in my reading/reviewing queue (as well as writing reviews for a further six that have already been read).  I will have finished my crash studying for the mathematics portion of the GRE then as well and unless I get hired immediately for a position I'm applying tomorrow, I should still have at least a month's worth of "free time" to do another reading project.

This time, rather than devoting 2-3 weeks to writing an average of a review a day of books I had never before read, I am thinking about reviewing a series of books in a fashion similar to the reviews I wrote of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun in 2007 and of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Peake's Gormenghast novels that I reviewed in the spring of 2009. Two series that I haven't read in ages (or at least the majority of the books) are Frank Herbert's six novels set in the Dune universe (I will not consider re-reading/reviewing any of the son's collaborative works) and Robert Jordan's ongoing The Wheel of Time novels (the first eleven novel; I've already reviewed the twelfth). 

Here are my experiences with each:  read all six of Herbert's books in 2001 but with the exception of reading the Spanish translation in 2004 and the first part of the Serbian translation (each for the first book) and a parallel reading of that translation with the English original in 2008, I have not read any of the other books since then.

For the WoT series:  I haven't read the first nine books since 2000, I read the 10th volume 3 years after its release (2006 read) and books 11 and 12 were read in late October 2009.

I imagine there would be a mixture of familiarity (which can breed contempt, ya know) and quasi-"newness" to these texts.  Curious also to see how my tastes have a reader have changed in the intervening 9-10 years.  But I probably will read only one of these in the next few months and since I feel charitable just this once, I'll let people vote on it, since I do still feel a bit of ambiguity toward both series and really am not all that invested in either one.  Oh, and since there doubtless will be negative comments as well as positive, if you're voting on the one you love the most, keep in mind that there might be a few more evisceration moments than is the norm here.  Then again, if you want to vote for the book that you think I'd rip apart the most, feel free to indulge in Schadenfreude.

Re-read will start a day or two after the poll closes late on the 18th and it may be only one book a week, or perhaps 2-3.  I will not read/review one a day, even if I am more than capable of doing so.  Let the voting begin (if it hasn't already begun as of the posting of this article)!

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