I’d love to get to know some of you better. And learn about the books you love and the ones you couldn’t finish.
So I will be asking a few questions about your reading habits.
What book do you keep going back to and why?
What makes a book as comfortable and warm as an old cardigan? What makes the characters feel like old friends even if they were written by someone from a completely different background from you?
Comment below or reply with the hashtag #bookchat
I could easily read Jane Austen over and over because of the pleasurable cascade of emotions it produces – especially “Persuasion”.
I think Jojo Moyes has a similar effect on me.
Yes! You should see my copy of the collected Austen novels. It’s dog-eared and it has lost its cover. It is well-loved, for sure. I think they are comforting stories to escape into 🙂
Palace of Illusions.
I never ever ever grow tired of this book. It’s basically the story of the Mahabharata (an Indian epic, the story of a bloody war between two branches of a family), traditionally told from the point of view of the men of the story, now seen through a woman’s eyes. I can never pass by this book without picking it up, caressing it gently and maybe reading a paragraph. A page. A chapter.
Or maybe just give up and read the entire book again!
Wow, it sounds really interesting. I’ll have to do some digging around on this one!
When it comes to rereading books, I generally fall back to ones I’ve loved since childhood: The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins. BTW, we watched a documentary recently about the woman whose story was featured in that last one. She was not a teen when she got left on the island. After she eventually went to the mainland after 18 years alone, she only survived about 6 weeks. They think the change in diet killed her.