A Reading Life

I just finished Ellis' book, First Family about John and Abigail Adams and was left with that same feeling I often get when finishing a book that I have lived with for awhile . . .it is as though I'm losing a friend. I remember well this same feeling from my childhood when I would reread a slim paperback about Capt. John Smith and Pocohontas, and another slightly longer, but equally historically inaccurate (I'm sure) volume about Abraham Lincoln over and over and over. In retrospect neither of these books was probably particularly well-written, but I couldn't bear to part with their stories and my friends the characters, so I spent countless late nights under the dim overhead light in my bedroom, renegotiating my body positions to accomodate for limbs falling asleep just to make it to the end of the book-one more time. I commented to my husband that I had finished the Adams book, and that indeed the story had ended as it always does--they both died, and John on the same day as Jefferson. My husband laughed with me, and said, "Well, thank God for that. Although, don't you think the author could be a little more creative than that?" Unbeknownst to my husband, he had inadvertantly hit on the yearning that drives me to re-read the lives of my favorite people over and over again. I don't necessarily want their stories to end differently--but I don't want their stories to end-- and it as though if I keep at it, keep reading (even the same books) that somehow I will learn something new or different about my friends. It is a sort of search for the Holy Grail for the reading life. Anyone on this search with me?