I could sit through the tales of the legate Caius Britannicus and his buddy, the senior centurion Publius Varrus, and how they got out of the army and founded the colony of Camulod against the coming dark age any number of times. But after that...?
The third book, The Eagles' Brood, sees us through to the maturity of Merlyn and Uther, the endings of the last the original Roman viewpoint characters, and it finishes up with the birth of Arthur. The rest of the story just doesn't have a bunch of interest again once I've read it through for the second time. All but the first three books got carted to Goodwill yesterday.
I've started rereading The Hunt for Red October for the first time in a long time now. Some authors get better over time, and some never again repeat the magic fire of their first work. Clancy is somewhere between the two; he had several solid efforts in his early going and Clear and Present Danger may have been his peak, but he hit the "too big to edit" wall pretty hard after that one.
My copy of Clancy's breakout debut thriller is an original 1985 Berkley Books paperback printing and I was distressed to realize that, while I can sit on the porch and read it easily, it's a headache-inducing exercise in blurriness to try and read it by the 15W incandescent reading lamp over the headboard. Nobody warned me about this.
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