Rereading your Favorites

Photo credit to Aaron Burden on Unsplash

     It’s okay to reread your favorite childhood books. I discovered this recently when I reread a couple of books from the Little House series. 

     To be honest, I hadn’t touched the books in several years. There were always bigger, more exciting books for me to read: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Ranger’s Apprentice series…the list went on and on. And, each time I finished one series, I looked for another one. (Readers are kind of like that.) It didn’t occur to me to try rereading some of my favorite old books. 

     It wasn’t until a month or so ago that I finally got out my favorite book in the Little House series, The Little Town on the Prairie, and began reading it. Much to my surprise, I was completely drawn into the book and didn’t do much else except read for an entire day. One book led into another, and before I knew it, I was loving the series all over again. There were several reasons why. 

     First of all, I was old enough to better appreciate the characters. Much of the time when I had been younger, I had seen them as cardboard cut-outs, people who followed a specific formula and didn’t have much of a personality. Of course, anyone who has read the books knows that isn’t true, but, as a young girl, I was too small to understand the great world of character development and growth. 

     One thing that stood out to me during my read-through of the last couple of books was character motivation. I realized why Laura Ingalls wanted to work so hard on her studies, pass the exams and teach school. (To help her sister Mary stay in college). It suddenly became clear to me why Laura hated Nellie Olsen and her schoolteacher so much. (Because Laura was jealous of their easy lives, of the fact that they seemed to get so many things when Laura and her family had to work so hard for anything.) Character motivation suddenly became clear to me and I appreciated the story even more for it. 

     A second reason that I liked the books so much on this read-through was that the girls’ ages were comparable to my own age. When I was six, of course a fifteen-year-old could teach school! Of course she could court a boy or stay home alone for a week while her parents were gone. Of course Mary, who was sixteen, was old enough to go to college, away from her family for months and months. 

     Now I think about those ages and suddenly, their ages seem so much younger. I wouldn’t want to be going to college at the young age of sixteen. I wouldn’t want to teach school at a mere fifteen years of age. The read-through showed me how much older children were for their ages back in the day that the books were written. If I hadn’t reread the books, I wouldn’t have ever figured that out!

     Thirdly, and most importantly, I was stunned by the Christianity that the book was steeped in. Every Sunday they went to church; Bible verses were sprinkled throughout most chapters; God was one of the most common characters, and moral values were high. 

     When I was young, I had taken these things for granted. These books were some of the only ‘grown-up’ books that I had been able to read, and it seemed only natural to my young mind that God would be in it. Now, even in family books, it is a surprise and something worth being excited over if the characters pray before they eat. Reading the Little House books made two things stand out to me. First of all, I was sad that I even had to be stunned about God being in the Little House books. What a testimony as to how far our country has departed in our walk with the Lord. Secondly, the Scripture and importance of God taught me how refreshing it can be to reread old favorites.

     As a wrap-up, I want to encourage you to try rereading one of your favorite old books. Not only will it transport you to a time when that book was all you cared about, but it may also seem fresh and new. The best works of art change for us and seem new as we grow and mature. The Little House series, though written for children, didn’t seem childish to me. There were pictures and fairly simple sentence structures, of course, but there was a deeper theme of friendship, struggles and sacrifice that I picked up this time that I had never noticed before. So go reread something. It’s worth it. As C. S. Lewis said, “Read and Re-Read—Re-Reading, we always find a new book.”