On re-reading books

Back in 2016 I wrote on GoodReads about the Alan Furst novel “Dark Star”:

Furst knows how to paint a scene but like the first book in this series, Night Soldiers, he didn't really understand how to pace the story the right way.

“Night Soldiers” was released in 1988 and it was the first of the series. If you’ve never read any of the “Night Soldiers” series of novels by Furst I can quickly describe them as World War 2-era spy novels, and Furst is a master painter with words. He is very, very good making you feel like you can see every nook and cranny of whatever scene he’s describing.

I came to it in 2014 while searching for novels relating to France. For most of my adult life I’ve been a budding Francophile so I’m always on the lookout for novels set in France (currently reading through the “Bruno: Chief of Police” series which is excellent. I’ll need to write about those later). My first read through “Night Soldiers” didn’t actually happen. I stopped part of the way in to the novel. It was just too tough to get through.

I picked it up again later determined to get through it and at the time, while seeing how great Furst was at description, I thought he had many problems with pacing and connecting the various bits and pieces together as he jumped ahead from location to location in the novel. I finished it, not quite enjoying it, and went on to read the other books in the series, most of which seemed to suffer the same problems. Fast forward to this year, almost a decade after I read “Night Soldiers” the first time.

I had just started up an Audible Premium Plus trial and discovered that most, if not all, of Furst’s “Night Soldiers” series was available to listen to there without needing credits. With a bit of a long driving trip ahead of me I loaded up “Night Soldiers” to see what I thought of it this time around.

I have to be honest I have not seen any of the problems I had with the novel on first reading it. Maybe it’s the way George Guidall reads it (another master by the way. This man is one of the, if not the, best audio book narrators). Maybe it’s, as the title of this post says, absence making the heart grow fonder. Maybe it’s just that I know the novel already and that’s making up for the problems. Whatever it is I’m thoroughly enjoying listening to it and revisiting the characters and places that populate Furst’s World War 2-era Europe. I plan on doing the same with some of the other ones as well.