In the past couple of months I have started rereading books I read last in the 1990s and liked a lot then. The surprise and excitement of discovering a new world is less, of course, for I am already familiar with the worlds in those books. What surprised me the most, is that some books still hold up while others have become boring, bland, or otherwise uninteresting.
For example, I was unable to even get into Williams' Otherland series. And I devoured Feist's Magician almost like I did when I was in my teens.
How do you experience rereads from your youth? What writing characteristics makes a book eternally fresh or almost immediately dated?
I'm reading Feist and Wurts' Mistress of the Empire. When I started reading Feist's Riftwar series in the 1990s as a teenager, I explicitly skipped this Empire trilogy because I wanted to continue with the Kingdom of Isles heroes I liked a lot. After reading most of the rest of the series, I forgot all about the Empire offshoot.
Now, decades later, I found lots of positive reviews about this Empire trilogy in particular on the Internet, so I started reading them. I have to agree with these reviews. I still like the first trilogy of the Riftwar series the most, but the Empire series takes second place. The rest of the series, although fun, became a bit repetitive.