The Week in Books: Hilary Mantel, and series reading…

I’ve been doing books in units the past few months, immersing myself in a topic or series. I haven’t read this way since I was a kid with series like The Babysitters Club, or Anne of Green Gables when I got older. As an adult, I just drift around from topic to topic, with no structure other than the huge To Be Read list I have (which, thanks to NetGalley, grows at about 15 books a week! Gah!).

But last year I started doing immersive series reading again with the Poldark books. First I binged on the series, then I binged on the books. The TV shows had been recommended to me by a friend a few years ago, but with a small child, and not a lot of time, I didn’t actually watch them until last year when I had a week alone in our house in California, getting it ready for new renters. I was up at all kinds of weird hours painting, and sorting through years of junk to sell on eBay, and during those weird hours I fell in love with Ross and Demelza. Within a few months I had downloaded all 12 books in the series, and had worked my way through them by the end of the year.

This year I had a goal to read the Lord of the Rings books. Somehow I had missed the boat on the LOTR popularity when the movies came out, which is weird because I play video games that are basically LOTR. I mean, I kill orcs in Skyrim, and I was a dwarf in Diablo, and my entire video game history is based on Tolkien. It was pretty criminal that I’d never read the books.

So I decided to make February the Month of Tolkien. I read each of the three books, watching the movies after each one. It took me longer than a month, and stretched into March, so I spent about 6 weeks in Middle Earth battling the forces of Saruman.

After that, I needed to cleanse my pallet a bit with something light and fun. I spent week or two indulging in some light chick lit, and then I moved on to the next thing, which was Thomas Cromwell.

Hilary Mantel’s final book in the Wolf Hall series came out in mid-March, and I wanted to prep for it by re-reading the first two, as well as finishing a few biographies of Cromwell. I don’t usually re-read books, but I had first read Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies when I had a teeny newborn, reading during naps and middle-of-the-night feeding times, and so much of it was a blur. I remembered how much I had loved the writing, and so I wanted to go back and immerse myself in it while actually awake.

So I started re-reading Wolf Hall in April, mixing in the audiobooks because they’re available on Scribd. I also mixed listening and reading with LOTR, and I found that it made the experience even more immersive. Usually I’m flipping back and forth between audiobook and reading, and the stories have a chance to stop and settle. But when I’m on the same story, mixing up between listening and reading, I’m completely absorbed in the story. It never gets a chance to settle.

Which means that when I’m done with a series, something is really missing from my life. All these friends I just made, and dramas in which I was immersed, all just disappear, and I’m left feeling empty and and lonely, missing my new friends. Then I need to completely switch up to something totally different. I’ll be finished with Cromwell by the end of next week, and after that I’m going back to mysteries by Rhys Bowen. The Her Royal Spyness series was a favorite of mine, featuring a woman who is 34th in line to the British throne, but dead broke during the 1930’s. I’m several books behind in the series, so Lady Georgiana will be my companion for the next month.

But I don’t expect to be so wrapped up in a series or character for a while. It’s exhausting, being so emotionally invested in a character and story for a month or two at a time!