What books do you read over and over?

[KarenSews2]

In the Janis Ian Forum, Anna posted a link to Janis' reccommended reading list from 2004. It got me thinking about the books that I read again and again. It may be a few or several years between readings, but I go back to them. Some of mine are:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser
This Other Eden by Marilyn Harris
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

I loaned out my copy of The Mirror and don't remember who has it. This Other Eden was lost in a move, I think. Luckily, they are both available through Amazon.

What are your rereads?

[Rkitko]

Oh, you know, I never understood this. I read books slowly, carefully considering every word. It's tedious, but I remember most of the content of the book. I've never gone back to reread because I'd probably get very bored since I already know what will happen. I do the same thing with movies--the only ones I've watched again and again are Rent and The Red Violin.

Case in point: My biology teacher in my junior year of high school made us read the 13th chapter of Laurie Garrett's The Coming Plague ("Revenge of the Germs OR Just Keep Inventing New Drugs"). Four years later I picked up the book for a fun read and went through it in no time. When I got to the 13th chapter, I remembered the content and put the book down. I've tried going back to it and reread it, but I get bored and put it down again. I don't want to skip the chapter and go to the next, but those last few chapters will never get read! Same thing happened with Matt Ridley's Genome.

[Irish Beth]

The chronicles of Narnia
Life is a banquet - Rosalind Russell
The portable Dorothy Parker
Lots, and lots, and lots.............:o

[Eva]

Books that take me to another place / time. Like some of my SF or fantasy books. And books that I discover something new in every time I read them.

Eva

[NinasSpaceChild]

Anything by Poppy Z Brite, especially her kitchen novels, I can read again and again. also anything by Christopher Fowler.

[DaveM]

The Portable Thoreau
"Bid Time Return" by Richard Matheson
"Time and Again" by Jack Finney
"The Name Of The Rose" by Umberto Eco
"Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

[Roady]

"The Godfather" is the only book I ever read twice and that's because I was in the hospital with nothing else to read-Not because it was a favorite. I may have read Nancy Drew or Hardy Boy books more than once when I was a kid but I recycle my books. That means I don't keep them but rather swap with friends or donate them to the library.

There's just so many books and not enough time that I'd rather read something new.

[sister rose]

Moll Flanders by Daniel DeFoe (read the book twice and saw the movie many times)

Law and Order by Dorothy Uhnak (read twice in high school, just started again

False Witness by Dorothy Uhnak (just found a used copy that I am going to read...for the 3rd time)

A Day Late and A Dollar Short by Terry McMillan (twice, so far)

Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton (plan on reading for the second time very soon)

[SongDragon]

I tend to become friends with my books... I can't give them up very easily. I often reread almost any book I liked. Mostly science fiction or fantasy as that is what I read the first time through, but I can and will read anything.

Recently, since I left most of my books behind, I only have an Ian Irvine series I'm not to the end of, yet, and the first book of "The Looking Glass Wars" which I got for Christmas and is a nice, easy read even before bed (the words and line-spacing is big enough that my eyes don't start disintegrating).

~Song

[Oak Kitten]

There are not many books that I re-read (by choice) as an adult, although I do collect Stephen Leacock books. He was a Canadian professor who wrote some of the funniest stuff I have ever read. He was very popular in the 1920s and 30s. My favorite book of his is Nonsense Novels.

As a child, there were certain books I would read over and over:

The Secret Garden by Francis Hodgson Burnett

Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Bullfinch's Mythology

Book of Nonsense by Edward Lear


Oak

[mixtymotions]

Being a voracious reader, I haunt yard sales, thrift stores, estate sales, church sales, etc. in my neverending quest for books. There is no possible way I could keep them all, so I pass along good reads to various family members and friends, and the rest I donate back to charity thrift shops. However, I do have certain books that will always be with me; ones that are like old friends that I cannot loan out or give away. Until recently, I moved quite frequently and some of these books have moved with me since childhood. When I am fortunate enough to locate a copy of any of these favorites, I purchase it and pass it along to someone I know would enjoy it, but I keep my original copies - no matter how tattered and worn they are. I have the collected works of the following authors (and no, you cannot borrow any of them!) :)

Alexander King
Richard Brautigan
Pearl S. Buck
Lewis Carroll
Tom Robbins

[Bat]

Good list, Mixty. I've always wanted to read Pearl Buck, but never have. Gotta do something about that!

Meanwhile, I've been going through my small (9 paperback) collection of Ngaio Marsh, and finding her absolutely delightful in her descriptive use of the English language, her ability to delineate characters and action, and her story lines which seem to just flow into life. Great writing for a Murder Mystery maven! (You can probably get her stuff for next to nothing on half.com. Worth every cent.)

I'll let you Google her name...how to say it drove me nuts for years until I finally found a site on Maori pronunciation. Just say 'sing', keep your tongue up there on the back palate, and proceed to say her name--long 'I' sound. It will sound sort of like a nasal N eye'-o. I think I've finally got it-- do NOT vocalize the 'g' . It takes a bit of doing, since English has no words which start with 'ng', but common in Maori.
Her books read much more fluently than her name does...which, incidentally, is a type of flowering tree. Sort of like naming a little girl, "Magnolia".

[Michael from Chicago]

Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Edgar Allan Poe

A Good Man is Hard to Find - Flannery O'Connor

The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Bellefleur, Night Side, Because It Is Bitter Because It Is My Heart
- Joyce Carol Oates

The Goodbye Look - Ross Macdonald

Margaret and I - Kate Wilhelm

Song and Dance Man - Michael Gray

Second Sight - Charles McCarry

[Michael from Chicago]

I saw Richard Brautigan on a list; I haven't read Sombrero Fallout in almost
twenty years. It gets a re-read this weekend. Thank you!

[Elliott]

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. I read it every five years or so. So good, and so funny on many levels.

[Bill_L]

Don't usually re-read books or rewatch movies. Only book I've reread recently is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy - just seems like it could happen that way someday. DVD's recently - Contact, Control Room and Almost Famous.

[Darlene]

I love "Jonathan Livingston Seagull a story" by Richard Bach. I have read it so many times. I read it over and over again to my children. I had tape I made of ocean music that I had taped the same crashing ocean music over and over again I think I had ninety minutes of it. We would sit or lay in the floor with a candle for me to read with. It was a special time for all of us.

I also read all of Torey Hayden books. She wrote "One Child" which is her most famous one.

Peace, Darlene

[DaveM]

I can remember reading Torey Hayden's books (I even remember hearing her interviewed on the radio with considerable interest). They were fascinating until I learned that she's a total fraud. She writes capably enough....I guess if one reads them as fiction there's no harm done.

How could I forget Poe? I have a neat six volume set of his complete works (including a few that were later found to be written by others). It's intriguing to see how well his spooky stories have held up--and on the other side of the coin, how wretched his attempts at humor now look. Hard to imagine that his better works were cranked out in exchange for a pittance, and that his first book, "Tamerlane And Other Poems", didn't even sell out its first small printing. Of course, the latter is also true of Thoreau's "Walden".

[Darlene]

OK Dave, I took the bait and researched Torey Hayden for about thirty min and will continue after I get some sleep. If you let me know where you got you information at I would love to have the link! Thanks Darlene

[DaveM]

Oh, I neglected to mention another oddball favorite: Frederick Forsyth's "The Shepherd", perhaps the closest thing to a religious story that I've ever enjoyed.

You won't find any discussion of Torey Hayden on the Internet--at least I have not. My information predates its existence and stems in part from a case involving a foreign publisher who discovered she had plagiarized one of her books from a Polish novel. I doubt that it's made the news over here--it's not the sort of thing publishers want circulated about bestselling authors. I do recall at least one newspaper article, however (c. 1991), which quite reasonably concluded that at least some of her characters were composites at best. That would have appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and presumably in other papers as well as it was a wire service piece.

Her books have always reminded me of Lynn Andrews' New Age narratives in which she plops down somewhere randomly and allegedly immediately gets in touch with some mystical group of women who introduce her to still more of "the ancient mysteries". Similarly, Hayden seems to have unique wayward children drop into her lap, all of whom provide her with complex and often controversial "case studies" some (e.g. "Ghost Girl", published at the height of the now-discredited "Satanic Ritual Abuse" craze) purporting to involve activities that simply do not exist. Her books also show a strong tendency to follow whatever pathology is "in" at the moment, which seems convenient, to say the least. And of course, there is never any documentation of anything--confidentiality provides a suitable excuse for that. And of course, room for considerable literary license, to put it politely.

I have also met Ms. Hayden and was astonished to find her inarticulate, insensitive, and one of the most self-absorbed people I have ever encountered. Unless she has another personality that goes to work, I find it impossible to believe that she could do any of the things she claims or even find any sort of rapport with children, much less the (usually) deeply disturbed ones she supposedly writes about.

[aabram]

Always loved The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein. plus the subsidiaries such as The Silmarillion, 'The Hobbit' etc

The Harry Potter Books :D

I enjoy a good period romance such as those by Georgette Heyer

I used to read titles by Dick Francis, but no longer do that any more. I'll post agian when I think of some more. :)

[Mimi]

Audre Lorde's novel "Zami. A new spelling of my name" is the most read book I have... Some Italian novelists (Giorgio Bassani and Elsa Morante) and last but not least

Mimi

[ponytail]

Once in awhile I reread Antoine De Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince," which always makes me have a therapeutic good cry, so I only reread it when I really need one.

Lao Tzu's "Tao Te Ching" is one of my all-time favorite poems and works of philosophy, and I reread it periodically too. For years the Witter Bynner translation was the one I favored, though I recently fell in love with the Stephen Mitchell translation.

Right now I'm rereading "Writing Down The Bones," by Natalie Goldberg, a book about writing as a "practice," like meditation or jogging. I find it to be kind of like a pep talk -- it gives me energy.

And I often reread the poetry of Alexandra Grilikhes, a poet and teacher who had a big impact on me and was a good friend of mine for over thirty years. She died of breast cancer a couple of years ago, but when I reread her it's like she's right there talking to me. She makes me wish all the loved ones I've lost had written books.

[greenpaul]

Two books which I have read and re-read have had a real impact on my life:
The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff; and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell. The first uses Winnie the Pooh as illustrations of Taoism and is an excellent means of doing so. It shows that Winnie is unknowingly wise, contradicting our normal interpretation of his character. Tressell's book is one which I have purchased many times and given away to many others; I was introduced to it many years ago owing to the kindness of another who only asked that if I liked it I may also pass a copy on to another. It vividly illustrates the relationship of workers to Capital and shows how they can be their own worst enemy.

Paul

[Darlene]

Originally posted by ponytail: Once in awhile I reread Antoine De Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince," which always makes me have a therapeutic good cry, so I only reread it when I really need one.


Thanks ponytail I had forgotten that one. It too may me cry. "If you tame someone you own them" I love that book! I also love the DarkOver series and least I forget "The Loin, The witch and the Wardrobe.

Peace, Darlene

[marjan]

Ugh, ugh .. (whispering with mouth closed) Scruples Judith Krantz .. hmm yu ditnt heer thet from me

[Beth]

Usually I don't reread books because I always have a stack sitting in my office that I can't wait to get to. Right now I am reading Train Your Mind Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley and (OK) rereading The Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. My stack of WTBR books includes Consilience: the Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson, and the Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control, edited by Barbara W. Ellis and Fern Marshall Bradley. And then there's the wait list at the local library... And now there's a whole bunch of animal books and info to read because I just started a part-time position at the Indy Zoo in their education dept...and that is a whole different story!

[hoops]

every book i have ever read in full and enjoyed i have re read so if anyone has a copy f the grapes of wrath or almost anything by ernest hemingway, don;t loan it to me, i don;t want it lol. elliot, thank you for reminding me of 'a prayer for owen meany' i have read that book at least 5 times, it makes me cry like a baby. when i was teaching, i taught and entire "grading period" according to "jonathan livingston seagull" and i didn;t teach english or anything taught in conventional school, in fact about 50% of what i taught was physical
peace
Noel

[Eva]

Ugh, ugh .. (whispering with mouth closed) Scruples Judith Krantz .. hmm yu ditnt heer thet from me
My mlipms arem sealedmm...

Mevma

[DaveM]

I find myself returning to some of Davd Macauley's books again and again, particular "Motel Of The Mysteries" and "Baa". Both brief tales illustrated by the author, the former is a delightful satire on 20th century life as imagined by a future archeologist who has excavated the remains of a fleabag motel (named "Toot 'n C'mon"). The latter may well be one of the creepiest stories ever written, beginning as a dark satire on consumerism and turning into something far more chilling. It is all the more delightful in that the chills don't necessarily arrive at the moment you finish the book....but they'll come back to you during the wee hours of the morning soon thereafter....

Some of you may be familiar with his various "Cathedral", "Castle", "City", "Pyramid", and other "how they built it" books, most of which were accompanied by PBS specials. If you haven't read them, they can be a treat also.

[pulmike]

I have the benefit (in this sense only) of a failing memory; so all my books are newish to me every so often. I recently liked Telegraph Days, by Larry McMurtry. I always like Steven Donaldson's SciFi and Fantasy. If you want to try approaching real science from a Seriously Good Writer's perspective, try John McPhee's incredible writing on geology: Song, since you are a scholar in Nevada, try McPhee's "Basin and Range". It will teach you about deep time, about the geology of the rock you are learning to climb, and about the special place you live in. You won't believe this 'till you try him, but he will hook you on geology to the point that you will stay up late at nightturning the pages. He is a Teacher. Stuff this good about any science is rare. Try it.

pulmike

[DaveM]

Loren Eiseley and Lewis Thomas are two long-time favorite science writers. John McPhee is right up there--from deconstructing a mountain range to spelling out how to build your own atomic bomb (as he did in "The Curve Of Binding Energy"), someone he always manages to make the abstruse seem deceptively simple.