Every now and then I find myself driven to reread favorite books, even entire series. Considering that some of those series can be more than 20 books long, and that I have a backlog of hundreds of unread books that I’m also eager to get to, I sometimes wonder if I can afford to spend the time re-reading like that, when I have so many other books to explore (and won’t be living forever). So what makes me do it anyway? I’ve been thinking about that while I pick up book 11 of my current compulsion.

It’s far from my first time through this one, so I recognize some of the relevant features. I don’t hesitate to skim through some of the slower bits that get the players moved from location A to location B so that event X can take place. What I aim at — what I relish in the story — are the little bits: the little humor scenes, suffering scenes, reversal scenes, as well as the drama endpoints of entire revelations, regrets, redetermination. In shorthand, it’s the humanizing elements that evoke my sympathies (I like these players), and the triumphal/despairing elements (I like their determination/merits) that cap the try/fail pulses.

And, well, I write series, too, and I reread those occasionally as well. While I’m hardly blind to my own defects, I recognize that my favorite bits of my own work are the same sort of thing, which I suppose is hardly surprising.

This whole dwelling on favorite bits seems to be a form of affirmation of what I think of as proper behaviors, proper attitudes, even (or especially) under stress, as well as in light-hearted moments. Those are the things that resonate with me. I relish opportunities to write them into my current works, so that I can be pleased to see them there later when I reread. In a very real sense, all the rest of the structure that makes the tale (and the whole series) hang together is just an excuse for those moments of demonstrated morality.

I don’t do villains well. I don’t feel that I understand them viscerally well enough, and so I structure my stories so that I can adequately emulate them for the motivational purposes of the tale (or create non-living obstacles rather than antagonists), but there’s little insight I can provide to them that feels entirely accurate to me. I think this is a reflection of the same impulse that makes me want to reread — they aren’t moral (to me), and so I have to emulate them in software (as it were) rather than feel them directly and relish them as their own creations, as some authors seem to do.

We like what we like… little is as unaccountable as taste.

What makes you reread your favorites? How much of that shows up in your own work?