It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and a single Follow Friday Featured Blogger each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
- Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
- Follow the Featured Blogger of the week - The Caramel Files.
- Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
- Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
- Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
- If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
- If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
- If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question:
What book do you reread the most?
I have two books in contention for this honor. Actually, they are two trilogies that I keep coming back to time and again. The first is J.R.R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings. I am not quite as obsessed with the series as Christopher Lee apparently was - he claims that he read the trilogy once a year, pretty much every year of his adult life - but I have read the books ten or twelve times. The first time I read Tolkien's work was during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade year, when I was living with my family in Tanzania. I burned through the
Hobbit in a single night, and then tackled the
Lord of the Rings, polishing it off in about a week. A couple months later, I went back and read through them all at a somewhat slower pace, taking my time to absorb the language and the imagery. I have periodically gone back and reread them once every three or four years since then, which is a pattern I don't really see changing. This was my first real fantasy novel and I found the experience of reading them to be exhilarating. I had always been interested in ancient and medieval history, and had spent some time absorbing books about the ancient Greeks and Romans, about the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses, and all of those old conflicts involving men in armor wielding spears and swords as hey tried to kill one another. I think that part of the attraction was that while living in Tanzania, I attended a British school, and as a result, my school history classes were heavy on Yorks vs. Lancasters and Cavaliers vs. Roundheads, which primed me for the study of their era.
The second series that I find myself going back to on a regular basis is Ursula K. Le Guin's
Earthsea trilogy. And by trilogy, I mean the original three books Le Guin published. The books she wrote after a long gap in time are fine, but they just aren't quite as compelling as the original works were. Perhaps this is because I first read the original
Earthsea trilogy when I was still young - if I recall correctly, the books were a gift from one of my childhood friends who I visited in between living in Tanzania and the country that was then called Zaire, which would have made me about twelve. This wasn't my first fantasy series - that was the Lord of the Rings - nor was it the second: By the time I found Le Guin's work I had already read both Lloyd Alexander's
Chronicles of Prydain and C.S. Lewis'
Chronicles of Narnia, but even though I enjoyed those, neither of them hit me quite the way Le Guin's books did. This was my first exposure to Le Guin's writing, and as a result, it was the start of my lifelong love of her work. Even now, years later, this series seems so very different from most other works of fantasy, and I just can't seem to get enough of it, or of the rest of Le Guin's books.
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