- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling. I mean. I’ve read this at least twice as an adult, so maybe it doesn’t really count as revisiting. But I grew up with Harry. For all that the books are imperfect, for all that I dislike the last three, for all that Rowling’s writing never gets better than serviceable, they’ll always be part of me, and I’ll always go back to them for a reminder of what it was to sink absolutely, uncritically, childishly into a fictional world.
- Predator’s Gold – Philip Reeve. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times recently – or, rather, I’ve mentioned its predecessor, Mortal Engines, which I re-read last year and, unexpectedly, loved. So I really want to find some time to re-read this sequel.
- Sabriel – Garth Nix. I very much want to re-read all the original Old Kingdom trilogy, straight through, at some point. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve really understood how lucky I was to grow up with these books, with their brilliant, flawed, shy, vulnerable heroines who have real agency and lovely romances that don’t compromise that agency.
- Fire Bringer – David Clement-Davies. I’m a bit nervous about this one. I have no idea how it will stand up to re-reading. I remember it being quite a dense book for seven-year-old me, so I suspect I might now find it leaden and/or overwrought. And possibly a bit heavy-handed on the Nazi allegory. BUT WHO KNOWS. I just loved the deer.
- The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket. Oh, the Series of Unfortunate Events books! They are gorgeous: I think you can only get them in hardback, and the thirteen of them (fourteen counting the Unauthorised Autobiography) are quite something lined up on the shelf. I loved the twisted Gothicness of them, the way they’re ostensibly set in this world, but twisted through ninety degrees so everything takes on a new and sinister significance.
- Redwall – Brian Jacques. Oh, Redwall. You were so species-essentialist. And you also had delicious food. This is another world-immersion thing, I think: I have about ten books in this series, and I used to read them all in one go, rolling around in the peace of Redwall Abbey and the swashbuckling adventures on the high seas and the weird posh Britishness of Salamandastron and…
- The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy – Gavin Maxwell. This is in no way a children’s book, and I have no idea how I got my hands on it in the first place. It’s the memoirs of a guy who lives in a remote house in Scotland and takes in various animals, including, famously, a succession of otters. I remember it as often adorable, sometimes tragic, and fascinated by the landscape of Scotland. It would be interesting to see if that memory’s correct, and if I get anything else out of the book as an adult.
- Midnight Over Sanctaphrax – Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. The Deepwoods books were so deeply weird, they were brilliant. Sanctaphrax isn’t the first novel in the series, but it was my favourite because it featured an awesome library (a non-trivial theme of my childhood reading). I think it also had overtones of satire on academia, so that would be fun to re-read.
- The Thieves of Ostia – Caroline Lawrence. I don’t think I ever made it to the end of the Flavia Gemina series, but the ones I did read I re-read a lot: I loved how they called up Ancient Rome so thoroughly.
- The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray – Chris Wooding. I don’t have a fucking clue why this particular book, which I read once at school, has stuck in my mind for so long: why the name Alaizabel Cray, or the word wych-kin, calls up such a delicious shadowed horror in my brain. I barely remember what it’s about. I remember a monster that you could hear as an echo to your footsteps, that would eat you not the first or second time you looked around for the source of the footsteps, but the third. (Seriously? That’s terrifying.) And that’s about it. I actually suspect I’d find it magnificently underwhelming if I read it as an adult.
(The prompt for this post comes from the Broke and the Bookish’s Top Ten Tuesday.)
The English Student 