The Rebounds

February 13, 2014

The Rebounds

Have you ever read a book, or a series of books, that have been so incredibly good that you have been left with a little hole in your life as soon as you've finished it? The ones that leave you thinking and living as though you are still in the book even weeks after you've closed the back cover. The all consuming stories that become the backbone of your own personal library are the most essential books you will ever read. These books are the ones that mould you into the person you are, the reader you are and they encase every single dream you could ever have. You share these stories with no one in the same way as you do with the characters. You, essentially, have a relationship with these books. A long, deep relationship that gives you an insight to who you are and what you are yet to become.

But, alas, the relationship always has to come to an end. Usually about 200 pages before you want it to end!

You close the book, stare at the back cover, and wonder why nobody else in the world seems to have noticed such a cataclysmic moment. For a while you read the blurb, skim back through the pages to find your favourite bits, hop online to research the book and the genius who wrote such a masterpiece. You slowly move on to finding something to eat or making a cup of tea to get over the shock of it all ending. Slowly but surely you start to acknowledge the real world a little bit more until eventually you feel ready to move on. Start again. Find a new love.

But the it hits you. Nothing you read now will be as good as what you have just read. Nothing will make you laugh or cry as much as the last one did. Suddenly you feel like you'll never read again.

At this point I think it's time you got yourself a rebound.

I was chatting with some work friends of mine who are as obsessed with reading as I am, and we got to discussing what happens when we get to this point. Buy a new book in hope that it will be good enough to pull us out of the book slump - but not so good as to leave us in the same position? Re-read a book we know we don't enjoy to get desperate for anything but that?

At this point I introduced them to The Rebound Books. (Should be said in loud booming voice......do it.......do it!)

I have got a store of books that I know are brilliant reads, that are good enough to pull you out of the slump without sucking you back into it simultaneously:

I was going to write a little review for each one on this post but having just looked back over the post I realised it got a little long. So, I'll do individual posts about them (if I haven't already done one!). That way I can get all excited and write far too much about each of them individually. But for now here are my rebound books:

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch