I have a compulsion.
I do not flick a lightswitch four times before entering a room.
I have yet to feel the urge to wash my hand repeatedly or with a new bar of soap upon each washing.
I am not compelled to spread the jam on my toast 54 times before allow myself to take a bite.
But I do have a compulsion.
If I get a book, and it is a book in a trilogy or series, no matter how recently I have read the early books in the series, I have to re-read the entire series up to that point. Everyone. Everytime. I just cannot read a book without having all of the back-story and characters fresh in my mind.
This is all right some of the time. Say… when I’ve picked up a copy of Dennis Lehane’s Darkness Take My Hand and it means that I have to re-read his A Drink before the War to get myself properly prepared to read the new one. That’s okay. The first book is 400 pages. It’s a quick read. I can handle that.
However, it just a little more difficult when I get the last novel in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, The System of the World. The first two books in that trilogy are Quicksilver and The Confusion, each weighing in at 944 and 816 weighty pages. These ain’t no lying-on-the-beach light summer reading books. (Well.. they are to me, but I like Neal Stephenson.) And I have to read them. Again.
And then there is Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series.
Crap. That sucker is at 11 back-breaking books now. And the series ain’t over yet. (People are starting to wonder if it ever will.) And, I regret to say, the quality of the story has been declining with each book. I know that a lot of people have given up on the series.
But the problem is, I can’t. I’ve put too much into it now to get out! I’ve read the first book NINE FREAKING TIMES!. Eight times for the second! And so on! I have invested far too much of my life to back out now!
Now, if you do the math, you’ll have noticed that I seem to be off by two books. Well, the newest one is actually out this October and I haven’t actually bought the second most recent installment.
You see, the only way I can fight this compulsion is… to… wait.
It was hard work, buying each book when it came out… and then sitting it on the shelf while I went and pulled the first book out again and started right from the beginning. So, I’ve decided that while I can’t avoid re-reading each and every book in the series again (I feel dirty just thinking about it), I will at least be a little kinder to myself and wait until I have at least several unread ones before diving back in. Make it worth my effort. It was easier when I only had two or three books to re-read. I read fast. But having to read around 9000 pages for only 600 to 800 new pages is gonna take a toll on anyone. So. I’m going to wait. For at least a few books.
I have yet to find anyone else that has this problem. My wife can just pick up books at random and read them. Blithely. And without a backward glance. We just got the new Harry Potter book and she just took it and started to read it. Without even a glance at the first 5 books.
This is just madness.
