Books I Would Reread, and Why

This week Long & Short Reviews links up posts about the books reviewers would or wouldn't review, and why.

This question seems to invite generalizations.

Books I would reread, or at least re-skim? That would be most books I've read. I skim-read fast enough not to mind the time it takes if someone asks which volume in a series had a particular minor character in it, or whether a quote attributed to the author online sounds like even a rephrasing of anything the author said in...A day will probably come when I'm not able to do this any more, but it's true for now.

Books I would not reread? Not just the ones I've deleted from Kindle or Book Funnel to save space. If the blog says I enjoyed a book, or even that I didn't like it much but you might, it's probably not one that I want to keep and reread every year, but it's one that I'd skim-read if, say, I was reading a volume that came later in the series and wanted to remind myself of the story about how the characters met. The ones I would not reread are the ones that seemed to be completely dishonest, like a horrible novel that claimed to be Christian in which a family seemed impossibly nice and cheerful and sweet because they were all on drugs, or like the genre fiction that never even shows a seam where the author actually wrote a single scene without help from a chatbot, or like the bestseller of bygone years where the twelve-year-old seduced the grown-up. That's not merely bad; it's worse.

(Though of course everyone's definition of the very worst in books is subjective, and subject to cultural influence. Because my culture values the growing-and-learning time of life in ways most human cultures never did, I think fiction should not mention any sexuality characters might have before they're sixteen. This may seem arbitrary to some people...deal with it.)

Most books that are identified as classics are generally worth rereading but, for a change, let's encourage new writers with a list of ten recent books that are currently in my Kindle, that I intend to keep there until I get printed copies, because I'm likely to want to reread...

(This list is arbitrarily discriminating against new books that I received in formats other than Kindle. That's because I'm offline, and Kindle is working better than Book Funnel or PDF at the moment. If that's not the best reason why your book's not on the list, at least it helps me narrow the selection down to ten. These have all been reviewed at this web site recently, and should be in your favorite bookstore. They were selected by looking down the list of titles in the "recently accessed" view in the Kindle app.)

Isabel Allende, My Name is Emilia del Valle

Emily Dana Botrous, With Love Melody

London Clarke, The Neighbor

Sallie Cochren, Let the Purring Begin

Channelle Desamours, Needy Little Things

Carl Hiaasen, Fever Beach

Robert Malone, Lies My Govt Told Me

Neal Shusterman, All Better Now

Sharon Srock, For Mercie's Sake

Barbara Wright, Anny in Love