Posted by Mike Dennis on August 01, 2017 at 22:19:50 user MTD.
In Reply to: Re-reading 'the twelve' after a decade-long gap posted by Magnus Smith on August 01, 2017 at 00:04:39:
A complete weirdo? Not at all!
I devoured the books in my childhood (and as I have explained here a few times lived an alternative childhood through them as an escape from the real world.)
As an adult I always had a complete set of the 12, a mixture of the hardbacks from childhood and paperbacks of the ones I had not got. I have to admit I didn't read them much but they were there on the shelf.
Then in my mid-thirties when the Brogan biography was published I became a mature student at the University of Essex where he lectured and I met him - well, sought him out (as I have explained before) which motivated me to return to the books.
In the last ten or so years I've gone to the other extreme (I can thank the Internet and the discovery of TarBoard), I have multiple sets of the 12, I have re-read them numerous times and read as many of the books about them and AR I have been able to get hold of.
Why? As an older adult I appreciate them on two levels, just for the pleasure of reading them and then reading them to discern AR's methods and motivations as an almost academic process.
What I find most interesting is that every time I read them for whatever reason I discover something new, something I had not noticed before, so even though I know the plots this does not detract at all from the re-read.
It's a curious thing, only yesterday a book blog I follow had a post about 'comfort' reading, and my response was of course AR's 12.
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