Re-reading books

I recall re-reading my favorite books when I was young.  I got "Gone With The Wind" for my fifteenth birthday and read it over the course of two days, that thousand page sweeping romantic drama stole my heart even more than the movie. The movie is still one of my all-time favorites, but the book is delicious. The story and the emotions it simmered inside of me brought happiness into my life when at times I was unhappy. When I didn't have time for a 1000-page engrossing page turner but wanted to recreate those feelings, I would re-read the last 50 pages or so, and the story would flood in.

So escaping into the book became a regular occurrence during my teen years. On Saturdays, we had to clean the house top to bottom. My room was usually a mess, so I would have a legitimate reason to be in there for hours, but I became really good at shoving my open book under my pillow and racing to look like I was cleaning when my mom came down the hall. Then I would do a little more cleaning and get right back to my book. I wasn't the stereotypical bookworm shown in movie or books, despite my deep love and affection for stories, I was very social.  Years later as an enlightened adult, I realize I'm split between an introvert and an extrovert. In school, I was social and had a group of friends that I spent lots of time with, but then the weekend came, and I loved spending all weekend at home without my friends. I got to recharge. It worried my older motherly sister that I wanted to spend Friday nights in front of the tv watching a movie or reading a book, but I just knew I needed to be by myself.

Now, with five children in my house and an extrovert husband, I need to escape. So sometimes when I don't want to search for a new book to read, I will go back to my favorites. This week I needed an escape from the election aftermath, so I re-read Shatter Me series by Tahereh Mafi, a YA dystopian romance. This is actually the third time to read it since I discovered it in June.  Want to know what I'm reading and what I want to read, then check out my Goodreads account.

Do you have books that you like to re-read?  I realize that many times it's because of the love interest is yummy, the dialog, the hilarity or other things bring me back to these books. Sometimes, like in Outlander, I know the story so well, and I don't care for all the descriptions and other stuff that make it an enormous book I will skip to the sections that just have the dialog or parts with Jaime and Claire.

Books (off the top of my head) that I've read more than twice:

1. Gone With The Wind
2. Pride and Prejudice
3. Emma
4. Shopaholic Series
5. Jane Eyre
6. Villette
7. Outlander
8. Almost all Susan Elizabeth Phillip's books
9. Some of Jill Shalvis' books
10. All of Sophie Kinsella's books (author of Shopaholic and more)
11. Divergent Series
12. Big Girl Panties
13. The Selection Series
14. Shatter Me Series

15. The Swallow (of course but mostly due to editing, though I do love this story)
16. Fifty Shades of Grey Series

Happy reading!

Isabelle