The Test of Time

The Bodyguard was on last night. I half-watched it as I worked, and wow. Just…wow. There were some things I didn’t remember from watching it in the theater as a sixteen year old.

1) The movie? Is bad. Baaaaaaad.

2) Whitney can’t act her way out of a paper bag.

3) I’m not usually much of a fan, but Kevin Costner was unaccountably hot in this role. Seriously effin’ hot.

But, perhaps most damning, I found myself pondering a question I know didn’t occur to my teenaged self: Why the hell didn’t he just quit and let her die?? She was a brat, a tragically stupid diva with no regard for her own safety who flouted his bodyguarding rules and yelled at him constantly.

That got me thinking about books. Keepers. The old Temptations and Desires and Loveswepts. The ones I have on my shelf that, if I lose them, I will pay oodles of dollars to replace so I can have them on my shelf again.

I don’t have many, probably far fewer than your average romance reader, and here’s a secret: though I dearly adored these books, I haven’t reread a lot of them. Part of that reason is that I started reading romance a long, long time ago, when I was very young. In fact, I’m 8000% positive that my current, 33 year old self would react violently, perhaps with lighter fluid and matches, to many of the books that I simply ate up as a teen.

So I’ve been hesitant to reread a lot of the books I once mightily enjoyed, though this movie is making me rethink that. I mean, it’s not like I liked the movie; come on, it’s a piece of crap. But I did have an entirely new appreciation for the character of Frank Farmer–the gruff, stoic man with a job to do. He’s hot! Painfully, ridiculously hot, and I don’t remember having that reaction when I was younger.

Maybe it’s time to broaden the range of my rereading, see if I can gain a new perspective from some of these neglected old favorites. What about you? What are some of the books or series you love as much now as you did the first time you read them? Or, conversely, are there any beloved old books you picked up…and promptly threw against the wall?