Fear of Losing Favorite TV

Probably the original Star Trek series was the first time I fell in love with a TV show in the same way that I was already accustomed, at eleven, to fall in love with books—with my whole entire self in such a fashion that the show and my love for it became a part of who I was. It was also my first encounter with a difficulty that swirls around this kind of love for television that is usually absent from the same powerful feelings toward a particular book. When I love a book this way—when I clutch it to my chest when I’m done reading it, when it stays with me always, when it is in some way me—I get a copy of it to keep forever. Maybe it’s a particularly nice copy and maybe it isn’t, but I have a physical copy that I can set on a shelf and be pretty sure, barring some manner of house-destroying catastrophe, that it will be accessible to me forever. If I need to read Harry’s decision to enter the Forbidden Forest again, I can. If I need to watch David and Alan take on Hoseason’s crew from the captain’s cabin, no problem. If I need to hear Jane tell Rochester that she’s no bird, I have but to take the book down from its place on the shelf and crack it open. And the thing is, getting that book in the first place, with rare exception, is easy. If I have ten or twenty bucks, I can get the thing and have it forever.

Rewatching my favorite moments between Kirk and Spock was a lot harder in 1992, when my only real access to them was through the reruns our local PBS affiliate ran on Saturday nights. I recorded them on VHS—a somewhat cumbersome and anxiety inducing process (what if I set up the recording wrong?!)—but even so I was restricted by which episodes the station chose to air. And keeping those recordings for later viewing was kind of a nightmare. If I recorded them on a slow speed to get as many episodes as possible on one tape, the recording quality was crap and would deteriorate fairly quickly. Record at a faster speed and only two episodes would fit on a tape. Even a show with a pretty short run like TOS still would run to forty VHS tapes to keep all of them. Not exactly tenable, especially if one likes *gasp* more than one TV show enough to want to be able to see it again, just as one likes to read favorite books again.

All this is much easier now, of course. Blu rays take up much less space than VHS tapes, and streaming means that you can “have” a whole show without it taking up any of your space at all. But here’s the thing—that all feels so very, very impermanent. Shows disappear from streaming services all the time, when the copyright agreements between the distributor and the service run out. And a blu ray can break or get scratched or degrade. Or… someday, owning a blu ray player will probably be like owning a VHS player is now—increasingly uncommon and eventually, probably, impossible. Those VHS copies of TOS I recorded nearly thirty years ago are pretty much worthless now. I don’t know how I would watch them, and they are probably nearly unwatchable anyway, having sat around losing little bits of data for decades. But the copy of The Hobbit my dad read to me when I was six is just as readable and just as lovely now as it was then.

It’s too bad, I guess, that we can’t really pass beloved visual media down like we can books, but what really puts a shiver down my spine is the thought of truly losing the ability to re-experience these texts that mean just as much to me as my favorite books do. I feel like so many of them are largely considered ephemeral and of the moment, while to me they are anything but ephemeral. I’m two-thirds of the way through watching Supernatural for the first time, and I know that this is one of my texts now. I’ve fallen so deeply in love with it that it is part of me, just as Jane Eyre, and Kidnapped, and Harry Potter are. I’m watching it on Netflix, but I also bought the blu rays. I’m not trusting that the show will be there ten years from now when I need to revisit it. But are those blu rays any better? Will they work in ten years? If I drop my copy of Jane Eyre in the bath, I’m always going to be able to go get another one. If blu rays don’t exist anymore when I’m sixty, will Warner Brothers have bothered to distribute SPN in whatever way is ubiquitous then? I shudder to think.

What TV shows mean as much to you as your favorite books? Which would you be devasted to no longer be able to watch?

When You're Afraid to Reread

While I'm not a big rereader, I do have my favorites that I come back to over and over. I seem to be perpetually in the midst of another Harry Potter reread, I come back to half-remembered books from my childhood occasionally, and I do a ritualized reread of A Christmas Carol every year (one stanza each evening from 20th December through Christmas Eve). I reread more often as a child and a teenager, possibly because I had fewer books available to me than I do now but I suspect more because I had less expectation that I "ought" to be reading certain things and just happily re-immersed myself in the stories I liked best. 

So I'm no stranger to the reread, but I have a handful of books I've been avoiding rereading, books that I loved so much at a certain moment in time that I'm afraid to go back to them lest they turn out to be less than wonderful and the memories are tainted. These are the books I would come back to precisely because I wanted to feel the same thing I felt last time but fear that feeling was singular and the memory of it is better than finding out I can't step into that particular textual river ever again.

Here are four books I hesitate to reread:

Number the Stars, Lois Lowry

I first read this World War II middle grade chapter book in fifth grade, and while I suspect I read it repeatedly around that time of my life, I've never reread it as an adult. I loved the story and the friendship between the main characters. It was probably one of my first experiences of enjoying a book while also understanding that it dealt with serious, real topics that were outside of the realm of what was entertaining. Ironically, it is my fear that my fuller, more complete adult understanding of the Holocaust will keep me from enjoying the book at all that keeps me from coming back to it now.

Heir to the Empire, Timothy Zahn

I no longer remember whether this is the first Star Wars book I ever read (I don't think so?), but it was early in my deep dive into Star Wars fandom early in high school. Every summer I spent a week or so with my grandparents, and I remember so clearly lying on a patio chair in their breezeway just inhaling this book. While the book itself was good and certainly helped cement my growing love of Star Wars, it is more the memory of reading it that I do not wish to disturb with a reread. Maybe if I read it again it would be just as fun as the first time and I would just add another layer to my memory of the book. But what if I was bored? Better to let it alone.

Circle of Friends, Maeve Binchy

I loved Maeve Binchy as a teenager and read several of her books. Circle of Friends was always my favorite, though. I loved all the characters, the setting was fascinating to me, and I found the way the book didn’t end with everything all tied up neatly and predictably happily both disturbing and refreshingly realistic. I’ve tried reading some Binchy as an adult, and I always wander away from them, finding them too loosely focused and a little too twee. It’s entirely possible that her writing style changed since Circle of Friends and I would find that one just as grabbing as I did at fifteen, but I’d rather not risk finding out I don’t.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

Of all the books here, this is the one I’m most likely to reread despite my reservations. I *love* Jane Eyre, and I have since the first time I read it, at sixteen, largely on the bus coming home from school. I was completely caught up in the gothickiness and the moors and the mysterious Mr. Rochester. I loved the way Jane stood up for her sense of what was right and that she didn’t take the safe, secure option. I rejoiced in its happy ending. I have reread Jane Eyre at least once since that first time but not recently. I know so much more about life now, and about the world, and I’m much more aware of the flaws of Jane’s time period. The way I would think about and react to so much of this novel will have changed so much. Bits that were just great story when I was younger will now have troubling things to say about mental health and race and misogyny and colonialism. And all that is good and as it should be. I have just not yet been willing to tramp through my love of this book with my adult, open eyes. That I get to waffle about “ruining” my initial innocent read of this book is, of course, a result of my own privilege, and I doubt that I’ll be able sit around without properly interrogating my memory of this book for much longer.

There you have it! Some of my favorite books I’m hesitant to reread. What are some of yours?