Buccaneers: Favorite Books and Authors

The second post of Week Three of the Buccaneer Blogfest is pre-programmed to walk the plank at 9 am on Wednesday. Long before 9 am on Wednesday, I will be entombed on a southbound bus. This way, at least I'll have a post to, er, post...

To the Books!

Today's post is all about our favorite books and authors. My brain interpreted "favorite" as meaning "those books I read over and over again like a super geek fangirl. Without further ado, here are the most reread books in my library:

1. Dracula. I'm a total dork for the original Bram Stoker. And yes, I've also read all the other progressively weirder things Mr. Stoker wrote. Lair of the White Wyrm, anyone?

2. The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion/Unfinished Tales. These are reread ever December.

3. Harry Potter. I reread them every July (except for this July! I haven't had time! I promise to start them again when I get back from Savannah on Sunday.)

4. The Decameron: Boccaccio's compilation of 100 stories told by a group of friends fleeing the Plague in Florence. The stories were written in 1350, and shed a huge, mostly bawdy light on life in the Middle Ages. There was apparently NOTHING uptight about people in that era. Nothing was out of bounds, off limits, or considered too dirty to talk about in public.

The premise of the work is that ten friends leave Florence to avoid succumbing to the Plague. They hide out at a villa in the countryside, and decide to tell stories each day to entertain themselves. Every day, each person must tell one story (except on Saturday, which is devoted to chores, and Sunday, which is a day of rest). Every day for two weeks, a different person is put in charge of the day's storytelling. Sometimes they pick a category the story must fall into. All ten friends relate a different story each day. Some of them are weird, some are raunchy, some are poignant. It's amazing how nearly 700 years later, the stories are still relevant. Wowie!

That's it for my compulsive rereading list. There are other authors whose books I never miss. I wait on pins and needles for Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novels. I read just about anything by Stephen King (next up from Mr. King, the Dark Tower series which Helper Monkey is finishing up at the moment).

And I shouldn't leave off one of my favorites, but one that I don't reread as often as the others: Sherlock Holmes stories. I love these. The original stories are all wonderful, but I also enjoy some of the modern stories told by authors other than Conan Doyle.

I think that's about it for this post, since it's now a full hour later than I planned to be up tonight!