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Books Worth Re-Reading

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There are very few books I have read from cover to cover repeatedly for pleasure. Study and work don’t count. Nor reading aloud to a child. Neither books you dip into now and then. Twice is not “repeatedly”. I think there are quite a lot that I’ve read twice. More than that?

For me, just six, here in order of frequency:

1. Alice In Wonderland – Lewis Carroll. So many depths to this. I’ve appreciated it differently at different points in my life.
2. To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee. The writing is so perfect and the emotions so intense.
3. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller. Still makes me laugh out loud.
4. Crime And Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky. I was obsessed with this as a student and it manages to disturb me today.
5. But Beautiful – Geoff Dyer. Gorgeous writing that matches the artistry of its subject matter. I’ve bought multiple copies and inflicted them on people, telling them it’s beautifully written and not about Jazz but about extraordinary black Americans and one white one.
6. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens. There is a rhythm to the writing that enraptures me every time.

How about you? Books you have read from beginning to end at least three times for pleasure.

3

Comments

  1. I’m with you on Alice, which cast its spell early and never let go. I tried to read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time last year and couldn’t get on with it; the children were just too irritating. For me you can replace that with The Great Gatsby, and append your comments about Mockingbird to it too. There is a good reading on BBC Sounds at the moment.

    To those I might add Christopher Priest’s psychological thrillers The Glamour, A Dream of Wessex and The Affirmation. Otherwise repeat visits are for comfort reading. Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise, Bill Bryson’s travel books, Geoff Nicholson’s novels.

    There are huge books which made a huge impression on me (Lanark, Moby Dick, Ulysses) which I keep on the shelves in case they call out to me but I don’t automatically reach for.

    • Brilliant! Thank you.

      On a similar note, Pooh and the Philosophers is very revealing.

      I’ve read all the Pooh books umpteen times, including the age related rhymes, but I usually grab a small child so I have an excuse.

      • I have a copy of Pooh and the Philosophers next to the toilet at the moment. I hadn’t considered the implications of the title when I put it there, but am puerile enough to enjoy them now that I have.

      • I think you’d enjoy this – “The Pooh Perplex”. A collection of faux essays by different socio political commentators. Very clever and funny, eg one on how the books are an elaborate allegory of how the working class, represented by Piglet, are overruled by the aristocracy in the form of Christopher Robin facilitated by the bourgeoisie represented by Pooh.

        It can be found for not silly prices.

        https://amzn.eu/d/09ST36qq

  3. I’ve re-read quite a few Muriel Spark novels: my favourite ones are Memento Mori, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means.

    I keep going back to J.D.Salinger’s Glass family stories, which are spread across three books of short and long stories. They do an incredible job at bringing the world in which they’re set (1940s New York, mostly) to life.

    I like to re-read Clive James TV criticism, which is spread across three books covering 1972-1982. I guess part of the attraction is to read him talk about Eddie Waring and Barbara Woodhouse, but he also talks about Albert Speer and Nixon. Plus the writing is great, he was probably at his best when he had a word limit.

    The above are all pretty slim books. The only large books I re-read are David Kynaston’s Tales of a New Jerusalem series. I’m just interested in post-war British history and, although the early volumes have maybe a bit too much about town planning, I’m always happy to read them.

    • I love Clive James as a TV critic. For years, I bought The Observer just for him. I dip into those books a lot but I haven’t read them cover to cover for a very long time.

    • Coincidentally I have just finished re-reading For Esme with Love and Squalor by Salinger.
      I often re-visit books that I have not read for many years but recently re-read a book within a month of first reading which was enlightening. Last year the GLW and myself decided to run our own Booker Prize by buying the six short-listed books and reading them before the prize was announced. I really enjoyed 5 of them and of course the one that I didn’t really get went and won it – Flesh by David Szalay- so I decided to give it another shot, and found it much better second time around. Whether this was down to it being so fresh in my mind or because it is written in a very stylised way that I was better prepared for I am not sure but I still find it interesting how different the re-reading was from my original take.

  4. Spurred on by, I think, mikethep, I recently started Lord of the Rings for the fourth time. However, I’m struggling – those godawful songs going on and on, the endless “Who’s he again?”
    Fell in love with Catch 22 when it came out, read it again last year. Nope, contrived and too smart for its own good. Something Happened, however, remains an out and out masterpiece.
    Only other I can think of right now that has stood the test of my time is Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, all twelve of them.
    I’m one who, for instance, can’t listen to The Beatles today – big part of my history but now all too familiar. There’s a very small number of books, records, films, TV etc that IMHO are worth going back to. Like they say about that fabulous holiday you had in wherever – never go back (says the man who returns to the Costa Brava each year but there’s always an exception to the rule).

  5. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read Lord of The Rings. I started at age 17. At one point, I was reading it every two or three years. I haven’t read it for about a decade, and I’ve just recently started reading it again. I like the associated literature as well.

    • LoTR is far and away my favourite book of all, and I’ve read it countless times. The hardback copy I was given in 1984, at the age of 13, is one of the few childhood possessions I still have.

      Each time I read it, I discover some detail I either missed last time or forgot about. Some of JRR T’s stuff is very hard going (for example, I’ve never finished The Silmarillion despite several attempts), but LoTR just *works*.

      Some others I’ve read numerous times:

      Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke – a wonderfully colourful tale of magic, with lovely language. Even the many footnotes are evocative.

      Sharpe’s Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell – the best of the many Sharpe novels, and a colourful portrayal of Napoleonic warfare. However, it doesn’t include his best bit of writing – that was in another Sharpe novel, the name of which I can’t recall now, and involved a drunken medic caring for countless wounded and dying men after a battle. The picture BC painted was so vivid and sad that I was moved to tears.

      Bleak House by Charles Dickens – I have to be in the right mood as it’s so dense, but what a writer he was. Such a mastery of setting and language.

      The Stand by Stephen King – the best book from my favourite author. The extended version is even better. Each time I’m out and about and hear a drunk or troubled person railing at the world, I think of the frightening “monster-shouter” from The Stand. Thanks for that, Mr King.

  6. I tend to re read Non Fiction books – especially the sciencey/ quantum theory type stuff (I have an ability to comprehend what they say whilst reading, but can’t remember any of it afterwards).

    But off the top of my head, books that have been re-read a few times over the years…
    – Iain Banks – Crow Road, Wasp Factory
    – Tom Sharpe – multiple, but The Throwback probably most
    – Steinbeck – Of Mice & Men
    – another vote for Catch 22
    – John O’Farrell’s History Of Britain books

  7. Strange, how certain books repay endless ‘comfort’ reading. I am a very middlebrow reader and over the years have returned time and again to the following off the top of my head

    Stephen King – short story collections (eg Four Past Midnight, Night Shift)
    Irvine Welsh – Filth
    PG Wodehouse ‘The Code of the Woosters’ any of the Jeeves stories
    Christopher Isherwood ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ and ‘Prater Violet’
    Jilly Cooper ‘Rivals’ ‘Polo’ ‘Pandora’
    Conan Doyle – Casebook and Return of Sherlock Holmes’
    Agatha Christie – Murder in Mesopotamia (for some reason)
    Vikram Seth – A Suitable Boy
    Alan Clark – Diaries

    • Yes, the Holmes stories of course. I went to a local Theatre In The Park production of Holmes last night which would have been greatly improved if we could have heard a word the actors were saying. It was amplified, but the speakers were on ground level so all the sound was absorbed by the front couple of rows of camping chairs, leaving those of us at the back to wonder what the 2 man cast were miming.

      • We were at an outdoor performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor last month in Dorset, unamplified. I had my hearing aids in and could hear perfectly but the friends we were with missed quite a bit. It was better when they came forward.
        Last year the performance had the hall as a backdrop and the sound was much better.

  8. Not sure I have ever re-read a novel, maybe a couple of Steinbecks as a teenager. I plan to re-read Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In just before vol 2 comes out (if it ever does)

  9. Like others here, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ (recently finished re-reading it for perhaps the first time in 15-20 years, but five or six times prior to that). The Sherlock Holmes tales and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books are occasional re-reads too – though I may be Alice-ed out. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes volumes and the Annotated Alice are superb – the latter adding a hitherto unknown chapter (‘The Wasp in a Wig’).

    I daresay there are other novels – vintage British crime novels – that I read more than once (Freeman Wills Crofts and ECR Lorac certainly), and various non-fictions books (biographies and music histories).

  10. The Flashman books would be my favourites to revisit. Ideally once enough time has elapsed to have forgotten how he has got himself into and out of the various life and limb situations. Of course they’re wholly inappropriate in content and language but there are so few opportunities to step out of the sanitised world of modern letters that it can feel like a holiday to get immersed in Flashman’s world.

  11. I first read Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier as a French A-level text at school in the 1970s. It’s one of the great novels of French literature, the only completed work of a young writer killed in the early days of WW1. It’s a novel of loss, longing and youthful idealism best read at the age when it’s easiest to identify with its themes, but it’s also one that repays re-reading, as I have done 5 or 6 times throughout my life. It’s also a novel which, if you love it when you first read it, will stay with you as it has for me. Alain-Fournier has little other published work – a few poems, letters and drafts of a never completed second novel, but I’ve read most of it, as well as several biographies of the author. Le Grand Meaulnes is set in the Sologne area of France, and I was lucky enough to visit the schoolhouse museum at Epineuil Le Fleuriel where its author grew up (and where part of the novel is set). My French teacher at school was an elderly chap who had clearly lost whatever spark had originally led him into teaching, but Alain-Fournier’s novel had struck a chord with him throughout his life, and many of us were influenced by his passion for it. Writers like Julian Barnes and John Fowles were indebted to Alain-Fournier (Fowles especially in The Magus), but I’ve never met anyone else who has heard of it, let alone read it.

    • I bought and read LGM as a direct response to being deeply into Fowles (fnarr!) in my 6th form/student years. I also remember listening to a Radio 4 documentary about Alain-Fournier back in the early 80s.

      • Radio 4 also did LGM as a Book at Bedtime read by Michael Williams some time in the 80s. It’s not on YouTube or anywhere else as far as I know, but Williams was a perfect choice to read it.

    • It is one of most favourite novels, and have read it at least three times. The first time I can remember thinking that Yvonne was possibly the most attractive girl in literature (I was a teenager). The last time I read it I just remember being overwhelmed with sadness at the fact that all this would be swept away by World War One.

  12. I’ve been re-reading my way through Dickens but that has reached a pause point mainly so I can make a doomed attempt at making a slight dent in my frankly embarrassingly humongous TBR. Over the years I’ve read LoTR five times and all of the Holmes stories countless times, (see also P.G. Wodehouse and James Thurber). The ghost stories of M.R. James always get an outing every Christmas along with some E.F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood amongst others. From childhood I guess my most re-read books would be Wind in the Willows and especially Treasure Island which may be my favourite book, although I prefer to imagine I haven’t found that particular book yet. The search continues. Of more recent publications I’ve read The Secret History three times and The Crow Road four times. I’m giving some serious thought to a re-reading of E.F. Benson’s Mapp & Lucia novels at the moment if I can find the time.
    There are lots of others. I can go on endlessly about books. I must admit to a far greater passion for literature than music.

  13. Every few years I need to read the Aubrey Maturin series, all 20 of ’em.

    Also the Chandler/Marlowe novels. Great writing and plots. The dialogue is dated but I can live with that.

    A few Stephen King books, weirdly are comfort reading for me. Dang he’ s good at his best.

    • I re-read the Aubrey / Maturin novels a couple of years ago. I’d love to read them for a third time but there are only so many hours in a day and so very many books as yet un-read.

  14. I just have too many books TBR on my shelves and in my Kindle to even consider the frivolous indulgence of re-reading at present… although I do keep almost all the books I’ve read, just in case, like.

    In the past I’ve enjoyed re-reading the ever-glorious The Nation’s Favourite by Simon Goddard, about the Matthew Bannister cull/overhaul of the Smashey/Nicey era of Radio 1 in the mid-90s.
    Two novels I’ve re-read are both terrific Holmes-adjacent yarns, The List Of Seven by Mark ‘Twin Peaks’ Frost, and The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, who has form in re-imagining the Great Detective.

    • “It was with the advent of the Laurie London era that I
      realised the whole teenage epic was tottering to doom.
      ‘Fourteen years old, that absolute beginner,’ I said to the
      Wizard as we paused casually in the gramophone section
      to hear Little Laurie in that golden disc performance of
      his.”

      I love that book. Marvellous.

  16. I am mid- “Three men in a boat” which I have read many times and never fail to enjoy.

    Oddly I’ve read “Executive Orders” by Tom Clancy multiple times. It’s trashy but oddly prescient of events which followed in the real world and he knows how to make you turn a page. Recommended.

  17. Wimsey. Sharpe. Peter Temple’s books. Holmes. Lee Child. John Connolly. Wuthering Heights.

    I haven’t got rid of any book in any format that I’ve bought, and I’m happy going back to most of them if the mood catches.

  18. At this stage of my life I don’t have time to re-read a lot, but I’m a re-reader by nature and most of my life has been spent obsessively reading my favorite books over and over again.
    So I won’t list all of the ones that fits your criteria – we’d be here all day!
    Just a few of the most re-read and most loved, starting with the ones already mentioned by others;

    LOTR (first read it in the summer between first and second grade, at seven, re-read it every other year until the films arrived and made me tired of the whole LOTR cult that suddenly was everywhere. But I’m starting to feel that another re-read is due soon).

    Catch 22 (again, started very early, probably around the same time as LOTR, and thought it was hysterically funny – it became one of my go-to novels for any time when I needed a laugh – but haven’t re-read it for a while now).

    Dickens (David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol and Nicholas Nickleby are the most read, the first because it’s the one we owned when I was a child so I grew up reading it annually, the second because of my tradition to read it out loud to myself starting every Christmas Eve, and the third because it’s one of my favorites).

    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass (my brother thought these were creepy, I loved them – which tells you all you need to know about our difference in personalities and tastes).

    PG Wodehouse (especially his funniest one: The Luck of the Bodkins, which will leave me gasping for air between attacks of laughter of the kind that will literally make me fall off chairs; but also the Blandings series, Heavy Weather being the particular favorite of those. Not a fan of the Jeeves stories however).

    Yes; Stephen King, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I’ll include my childhood favorite Desmond Bagley in this category as well; pageturners with re-readability.

    And now to the ones not yet mentioned:

    Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one of my all-time favorite novels and I must have re-read it at least fifteen times. I had to upgrade to a new hardcover edition a couple of years ago, as the old paperback I’d owned since the 80s was beginning to fall apart.

    Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (but I never liked the two sequels) is in my Top Five as well. I grew up with it, have read it at a guess twenty, perhaps even thirty times, and it’s pure comfort apart from being one of the funniest novels ever written. It’s also a book we quoted at each other in the family, and it was my dad’s all-time favorite, and on his bedside table til the day he died (even though he couldn’t read it anymore during the final couple of years of his long life).

    Harpo Speaks! is the funniest and most heartfelt memoir I know, and I keep returning to it for comfort and endless laughs.

    Carl Jonas Love Almquist – Det går an…a Swedish classic and possibly the best ever short novel out there. Ahead of its time, beautiful language, highly entertaining as well as addressing serious subjects, I must have re-read it at least twenty times (easy to do, as it’s only 140 pages long). Unfortunately, as I found out last year when I bought the English translation for a good friend; there is no good translation of it into English! I read through it and it was appalling and amateurish, full of mistakes and leaving out all of the flair of the original text. So please, don’t buy it!

    OK, there are so many more to mention that I think I’ll have to stop now, before I bore you all to tears… I miss re-reading, but at the moment I’m mostly unable to. Being my mum’s “librarian” means that I have to buy a lot of new novels (and some biographies and essay collections) to feed her bookish appetite (well; and mine), and of course then I want to read them too, so we can discuss them.
    She’s 95, still healthy and bright, but you never know for how much longer that will be the case. So I’m thinking that I’ll postpone my re-reading while she’s still alive, there will be plenty of time to get back to it later (and by then I’ll be retired as well, and have plenty of time for both).

    • Harpo Speaks! is a fascinating book that i think about quite often. It isn’t full of zingers and wise-cracking one liners, more a specatator’s view of New York between the wars. Very little about the movies – but a lot about the hustling to make dough in the early days with his brothers. You can feel the poverty, like when reading Angela’s Ashes, when an occasional meal of bread with jam is one hell of a feast. Once success comes, he’s playing croquet and lunching with Dorothy Parker and pals every day. He doesn’t say “but I’ll never forget where I came from…” he fully immerses himself in high society and enjoys it.

  19. Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ which I’ve read a dozen+ times and find it as fresh every time as the first time I read it.

    I also have read F.H.’s 5 books that followed at least twice.

    I’ve also read all his son Brian & Kevin J. Anderson’s prequels and sequels but they cannot be compared to the majesty of ‘Dune’

    After reading the posts above i was reminded that I can pick up any of Tom Sharpe’s books and find them as hilarious as the first time.

    Also in a different genre Iain M. Banks ‘Culture’ novels.

  20. The first three volumes of Clive James’ autobiographies. Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was In June. These deal with his childhood in Kogarah, a Sydney suburb, university days, his decision to move to the U.K. and his time at Cambridge.

    The subsequent volumes which deal with his eventual journalistic success and tv fame are very interesting but lack the wit and charm of the first three. According to him he was hopeless and probable failure but for some blind luck and huge generosity of others. Which is the same for all of us to a degree. They’re also deeply and profoundly funny.

    • Falling Towards England is a very interesting book. It covers his time in England before he goes to Cambridge and he is pretty frank about his failures before he gradually starts to make some progress (and connections). He lays it on a bit thick, but as autobiographies go, it’s as far away from the “needless to say I had the last laugh” style of some celeb autobiographies that you can get.

  21. I still reread 3 books that I first read in my teens (so 50ish years).

    The 39 Steps by John Buchan
    The Day of The Triffids by John Wyndham
    Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household ( a standard text in Higher English (Scottish exam) back in my day).

    Still love them all, and I find new details each and every time I read them.

    • Ooh, that reminds me – I must obtain a copy of Wyndham’s The Chrysalids and read that again. I read and loved it a couple of times, but decades ago.

    • I reread 39 Steps and Rogue Male fairly recently and also found good podcast series readings of them which were good, both with Michael Jayston reading.

      • The 39 Steps is a great piece of work. All three of the film adaptations bear little adherence to the events and actual finale of the novel. My favourite is the 1953 version starring Kenneth More. Cutting quite the figure in his blue shorts and brown brogues!

        The 1979 tv version of Rogue Male is very well done. Peter O’Toole is cast well, and the end stays true to the novel. Sweet revenge.

        *Spoiler* the main character is forced to hide in a holloway in a wood. So taken with this, Robert Macfarlane wrote a short book on holloways. I’ll leave you to guess the title.

  22. There are very few modern novels I have reread; an exception is Midnight’s Children which completely blew my mind when I first read it. Second time round I had a slight sense of disappointment- probably because it could never have lived up to that first impression. Despite that I do want to reread The Satanic Verses. Again, I thought it was extraordinary when I first read it, but that was in the wake of the outrageous clamour for it to be banned; it would be interesting to reread it without all that background noise.

    But I have read many ‘classics’ more than once, and I think most of Dickens, Jane Austen, and the peerless Middlemarch would meet your threshold of at least three times. Never tire of them. About to start Bleak House again and I genuinely can’t wait.

  23. This is absolutely a bang on thread @tiggerlion

    Firstly, on the subject of TBR v rereads. In the words of Mr Berry

    Sometimes I will, then again I think I won’t
    Sometimes I do, then again I think I don’t

    We can never read em all, and so I do reread as well as try and get the TBR pile down (currently 90 on the Kindle, 60 actual books). For the last decade I’ve been focusing on rereading through some favourite authors:

    JG Ballard – currently up to Super-Cannes, so near the end.
    Iain M Banks – four novels out of ten in the Culture sequence
    Douglas Coupland – midway through his, (will stop around Generation A, lasted 10 mins on audiobook with Worst Person Ever. Worst Book Ever Douglas).
    Arthur C Clarke – up to Childhood’s End, again will stop at Fountains of Paradise, the stuff after that is all bad.
    Kim Stanley Robinson – will complete the Mars trilogy second time around. Enjoyed it much more than first time around. Have more patience with his lack of plot writing.
    William Gibson – midway through the ‘Bridge’ trilogy, so finishing this and the Blue Ant trilogy to come.
    Richard Ford – two out of four of the Frank Bascombe novels to go. Again, I have probably read The Sportswriter at least three times.
    Rereads to come: the Philip K Dick novels, around 36; the Hyperion novels by Dan Simmons.; Quiet War trilogy by Paul Mcauley; the complete Foundation from Foundation to Foundation and Earth. In five years I will be able to start a Dance to the Music of Time Again,
    etc etc.

    • I had read and reread the Foundation trilogy since school – but for some reason, I was moved to read the remaining four books last year. They were, of course, better than I expected, if not quite on the same level as the core trio. Makes me wonder why I wasn’t even tempted to read them before…

      • The two sequels yes, not as good as the core trio but decent reads. The prequels I have chazza’d, the splitting a fixed amount of narrative into ever smaller slivers, and as with all prequels we know where everything is headed…

        I have a real soft spot for ‘golden age’ sci-fi: Dick, Asimov, Clarke, Algis Burdys, Brian Aldiss, Campbell, Clement, Simak, Pohl. All wrote very short novels or short stories, and they have a real post-war nostalgia element now. The way the future was…can re-read all of the above. I have a couple of Heinlein but really can’t love him the same way..

  24. Ordinarily I don’t re-read but ones I read a few times have been:

    Hi Fidelity – Nick Hornby
    Killshot – Elmore Leonard
    Oliver Twist – Dickens ( the one I have read most.
    Down and out in Paris and London – George Orwell
    Raymond Carver short stories – ideal for dipping in and out of

    Intend to reread Motel Life by Willy Vlautin as it started my enjoyment of probably the best living US writer.

  25. Sorry; I need another go, or my brain will never stop nagging me about the ones I forgot…!

    Short stories: I grew up reading (and re-reading) all of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories from a much earlier age than would be seen as appropriate…which would be five or six. My love of scary stories began there and never left me.
    Another favourite author of short stories whose collections I re-read endlessly is Ray Bradbury; The Illustrated Man and The October Country in particular (as well as a couple of his novels).
    And moving away from genre fiction; the short stories of Gogol of course. Genius.

    Moving onto poetry, the three pillars of my love for poetry, read and re-read again and again over the years are:
    The Divine Comedy by Dante – especially Purgatory, which is the best thing ever written.
    The poetry of Swedish author Harry Martinsson – first and foremost his dystopian masterpiece Aniara, about an end-of-the-world space cruise gone wrong.
    And finally the futurist poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky; especially his love poetry, which I was obsessed with as a teenager. His linguistic creativity and his dark humour spoke to me, still does.
    I will say; with translated poetry especially, it very much depends on the translator! I have several collections of Mayakovsky’s poetry, with some overlap of poems by two different translators. They can kill a poem, or make it shine. But unless you know the translated language, you’ll never know which version comes closer to the original…

    If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi, is another memoir that I keep coming back to. To be able to write with so much wisdom and beauty about something so unspeakably ugly and evil is nothing short of a miracle.

    Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, is the one I love and have re-read a few times in the relatively short time since its publication. Didn’t like The Secret History much, liked the dickensian qualities of The Goldfinch a lot, but I can’t see myself re-reading it until I’m retired, but The Little Friend is just my kind of treat. Love everything about it.

    I must have read Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana ten times, and it always makes me laugh. Brillant premise, deliciously executed.

    And the books that made me laugh and cry as a child; The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Bounty trilogy, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, to name only the most re-read.

      • If you need six tries to appreciate a poem, I’d say it’s not a very good poem…to fully understand it? Probably six reads, but not to enjoy it.
        But also, The Divine Comedy and Aniara are not just ordinary collections of poetry, they are stories in poetic clothing (especially Aniara).
        Plenty of poetry in my library that I’ve only read once, and felt no need to revisit, others got a second visit but that only confirmed my first impression.
        So to me poetry counts! 😉

  26. As we’re having a second go, I give you all the following which I’ve read at least 3 times –

    Dickens – Great Expectations
    Sherlock Holmes short stories
    Sebastian Faulks – Birdsong
    Graham Greene – Brighton Rock
    Laurie Lee – Cider With Rosie
    Thomas Hardy – Mayor of Casterbridge / Tess / Jude

    Poetry of course just demands to be re-read on a regular basis, and all of the following can yield something new on each occasion – Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion, Roger McGough, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Simon Armitage, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wordsworth, Coleridge…..

  27. I read “American Tabloid” by James Elroy with slight shock at the whole thing and then restarted it the moment I finished it. Not for the faint hearted, for sure. It’s part of a trilogy which deteriorates at it goes on but I know I’ll read them all again.

    • Depends how soon you re-read it after the first read!
      But seriously, knowing “what happens” is one of the great parts about a re-read. It takes away the stress of wanting to rush through the book to find out, and leaves you with time to appreciate the language and the clever details that you missed the first time around.
      Also, books you’ve read many times, perhaps since childhood or youth, they become friends and are able to comfort you in bad times.

    • There’s more to a book than a plot. To take the examples I give way up there, The Great Gatsby is worth rereading for how your attitude to the characters changes with age (except Tom, who never becomes sympathetic). Even if it is just about plot, the Christopher Priest novels I mentioned all have narrative trapdoors that very firmly remind you that an author has been in charge (I nearly put in control, but that overstates the author’s role in a two way process). You will want to reread them almost immediately to see how he does it. As has famously been observed, no man steps into the same river twice.

  29. As I don’t believe anyone’s mentioned them I will chip in with any and all of Flann O Brien, but especially The Third Policeman – there are passages in that that make me giddy every single time – and all of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Books (although I have come to the conclusion that HHGTG is best consumed in the medium of radio, I don’t care for the ending as broadcast).
    People sometimes joke that they wish they could have a minor brain injury so that they could watch, say, The Sopranos as if for the first time again. I’m with whoever mentioned pop science books above. I can follow them while I’m reading them, but I can also go back after a few years and read them all over again as if most of it was new to me. Excellent value for money!

  30. My fiction list is all short stories with one very long story:

    Lord of the Rings, read multiple times, although I enjoyed the Andy Serkis audiobook so much that I think this will be my preferred delivery mechanism, going forward.

    The ghost stories of M.R. James. Absolutely masterful. Read dozens of times.

    Lovecraft: Read many times. Not a particularly good writer (in fact, often absolutely terrible!) but he created an interesting mythos that is addictive.

    Sherlock Holmes: I’ve read many times. Comfort food in book form.

    Saki: Short, sharp and perfectly suited to occasional grazing.

    Molesworth: A work friend and I recently discovered a shared love of Molesworth, which has had us both re-reading it for the umpteenth time.

    There are far, far more non-fiction books that I have dipped in and out of for decades. A few of the more notable:

    The Beatles Gear by Andy Babuik: I have had all editions of this book, as it has doubled then tripled in size. If I was on death row and allowed one book for my final week, it would be this. The Stones Gear book isn’t far behind.

    The Rolling Stone Record Guide (original red one): Pre internet, this was my bible and informed virtually all my musical purchases. I used to carry it around as I trawled through second hand record shops. It still sits on my shelf as a relic, a collection of loose pages in a plastic bag. I still browse it, from time to time, even though I can quote most entries by heart.

    Air Disaster (Vols 1-4) by McArthur Job: A series of technical volumes on prominent aircraft crashes that are still the best print sources for many of these incidents. I’ve re-read these numerous times over the last 30 years. I’ve always had a fascination for the problem solving/investigative aspects of incident investigation, and this has morphed into my career.

    Why Buildings Stand Up/Why Buildings Fall Down: See above

    On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee: A bit of a cheat, because it’s not like I’ve read it cover to cover multiple times, but I’ve dipped into my copy for 20+ years and every page is full of interesting nuggets.

    Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage: Similar to above, has been a book I’ve dipped into for decades. Unexpectedly full of wit and wry asides.

  31. I’m late to this thread and quite a few of my re-reads have already been mentioned – how surprising!

    P G Wodehouse, lots of them, especially the Jeeves and Wooster books but others too, especially Leave It To Psmith
    J R R Tolkien, I like The Hobbit less each time I read it but it has to be read as a sort of light warm-up before diving into The Lord of The Rings again. I’ve just re-read Humphrey Carpenter’s superb biography of JRRT and feel I’m on the cusp of another Tolkien binge.
    Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes stories are always enjoyable
    Clive James, I read his tv criticism anthologies again and again in my younger days and I still like them. Unreliable Memoirs is wonderful but I find his self-regard increasing in the later memoirs and like them less.
    Spike Milligan, I first read his war memoirs in my early teens and still find them funny and moving in equal measure.
    Robert Graves, I Claudius and Claudius the God, brilliant imaginative historical writing.
    Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Great Shark Hunt used to be great favourites although I can’t read him for long now without getting tired of the attention-seeking.
    A A Milne, Winnie The Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner still work for me.
    Conrad, Heart of Darkness is probably the only book of his that I’ve read three times.
    Giles Smith, Lost In Music, my favourite music memoir and very Word-friendly of course. The anthology of his tv criticism, Midnight In The Garden of Evel Knievel, is also excellent.
    Hunter Davies, I think I have 3 editions of his Beatles book.
    Mike Brearley, Phoenix From The Ashes, my favourite cricket book – telling the story of the 1981 Ashes series when Ian Botham performed Boys Own feats on a daily basis – and The Art of Captaincy which is brilliant about cricket and psychology in very straightforward terms.
    Goscinny and Uderzo, the most frequently read books I own are the early Asterix books. I first chose them from the local library before I was at school and my mum would read them to me – I loved the pictures. Then I started reading them for myself and I still re-read them and find new things to smile at in both words and pictures. Asterix The Gladiator, Asterix In Britain and Asterix At The Olympic Games are probably the ones I’ve read the most. It would be too boring to list all the ones I’ve read 3 times – it’s nearly all of them.

    • Another fan of Lost in Music, although I’ve only read it once or twice. IIRC, it was in LiM where I read about the phenomenon of visiting a music shop and going to the section for your favourite artist to look for a new release, even though as a fan you know very well that they don’t have any such release and maybe aren’t even in the studio. But still you have to look, just in case… I regularly do this, even though I know that I’m wasting my time.

      • I read every day – an upstairs book, a downstairs book and a back-up book. I am 75: so many books read, so many books yet to read, so little time (probably), thus I very rarely re-read.

        However,@steve-walsh, your mention of “Lost in Music” prompted me to take it off the shelf earlier today and I’m now on page 77! Lovely book.

        @cleanersvenus used to contribute to this site but hasn’t done so for a while. I used to suspect that he was actually Martin Newell himself but many years ago he made reference to “my mate Martin” so my suspicion switched to it being yer actual Giles Smith.

        Probably not tho’.

          • Always many on go:
            Reading strategies. Currently:
            Kindle on way to work, also to read when Mrs Moles demands the light off – On the Calculatation of Vol II
            Book group 1 – Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (20 pages a day to finish by deadline)
            Book group 2 – Chain Gang All Stars
            ‘Upstairs book’ (ie toilet read) Wild Boys William Burroughs – a ‘dense book
            10 pages a night very long book – Green Mars, KS Robinson
            Not currently active: One non-fiction, last read the Marx Francis Wheen biog, will be re-activated when I’ve got through the book group logjam.

            • Just the three or four-ish for me at the moment. I’ve just embarked upon the first two after finishing Cast Away by Francesca de Tores a fictionalised account of the life of Alexander Selkirk and this month’s Maigret. So I’ve got two novels on the go namely The Keeper by Tana French the final book in her Cal Hooper trilogy on Kindle and North Woods by Daniel Mason as an audiobook. I’m late getting to this but that is often deliberate. I prefer to read books after the dust has settled post publication and the surrounding brouhaha has fallen away. The other two are a complete collection of Larkin and a not complete book of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I tend to dip into poetry collections rather than read from cover to cover. Sadly there are no book clubs near to me for I am cast adrift amongst savages.

              • @pencilsqueezer Amazon really own me too with the monthly 99p Maigret.

                When I say book groups I actually mean me and two friends drinking wine, eating cheese and talking about a book. And a splinter group which is me and one of these friends and his wife.

                • I’ve got another nineteen months of Maigret as I limit myself to one a month so I’ll be seventy two when I finally finish them off. Sadly the only friend I still see no longer reads so my reading is very much a solitary pursuit as is much else alas.

            • What do you think of On The Calculation of Volume @moseleymoles ?
              This is the best series I have read ofr a long time & I am eagerly awaiting the 5th book on the 5th November!

              (They have missed a trick not releasing it on the 18th!)

  32. This is a fascinating thread & is going to cost me a pretty penny i think! A lot on here that are on my list to read & this will be the prompt to do so i reckon.

    Over the last few years I have made a conscious effort to only read new, this is because i was a serial rereader & would happily read some favourites over & over. To date I think i have read 1984 at least 30 times & will certainly do so again. I was given the Facsimile as a present & reading the notes that Orwell made whilst writing made me fall in love with it all over again!
    To @Gatz point above, i think it is interesting how your perspective can change on certain characters & a character you liked/disliked on first read can shift dramatically when you read it with a few more years under your belt.

    I would happily reread all of Orwells novels. 1984 is the clear winner for me, but Animal Farm, Burmese Days & (the underrated) Keep The Aspidistra Flying are all excellent.

    Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre – this gets better with every read. Reading it in 2026 would be wildly different than reading it in 2003. What was once satire…..

    White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Every time I have read this i just marvel at how she wrote something as good as this as a debut novel. It is a phenomenal achievement. I think i have read all Zadie Smith books more than once, but this one probably x 10.

    Neneh Cherrys excellent autobiography A Thousand Threads – I have told a little white lie as i said i have only read new this last few years. The one exception is this, which i immediately started again such was my love for it. This will be reread again in the future too.

    A couple of others that have been reread & would happily pick up again today:

    The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
    The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
    Driving Jarvis Ham by Jim Bob (Yep, him of Carter USM fame) – this is a book that will genuinely make me laugh out loud

    non fiction:
    Cider With Roadies by Stuart Maconie
    Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography by Danny Baker
    The Big Midweek: Life Inside The Fall by Steve Hanley
    Unknown Pleasures – Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook
    45 by Bill Drummond

    • Was re reading Burmese Days this weekend. It really is spiky, you can sense the roughness around the edges that would refine nto the fluency of his later writing, but absolutely impassioned and righteously angry.

  33. Thinking about this subject, I find it interesting to note that many of my strongest reading experiences are books I haven’t dared read again, for fear that I won’t love them as much the second time around and thus sully the memory of those glorious first reads…

    I didn’t have that fear as a child or teenager, it’s something that’s crept up on me with age, perhaps (subconsciously) as an excuse for not having the time to re-read much.

    • I hear you. Definitely a related syndrome to over listening and ‘using up the magic’ – I could listen to Station to Station or Hounds of Love every day for a month, but would never want to listen to them again possibly. HOL is now so ubiquitous I have to actively avoid listening to it!

  34. Just popping back in to suggest that the three trilogies of Robertson Davies fulsomely reward re-reading multiple times or just the once if unbelievably you haven’t as yet acquainted yourself with them. * shakes head and wanders off muttering.

    • Yes! Though I’ve read them only once so far.

      It won’t register a flicker on the Surprise-o-Meter that I assumed The Deptford Trilogy was all abaht Sarf Lahndahn.

      It isn’t.

      • Disappointingly they lack audiobook availability apart from The Deptford Trilogy and annoyingly The Cornish Trilogy which is for some no doubt legal nonsense minus Rebel Angels. I may indulge in the Deptford Trilogy recordings which will be a handy way of immersing myself in it one more time whilst taking a line for a stroll.

  35. Just remembered the Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe, an extraordinary vision of a disintegrating mind. I have to really be in the humour for it but I’m always glad that I’ve gone to the trouble.

  36. Gosh, what a great summary of great reads this thread is. Like many, I’m a repeat reader of The Lord Of The Rings; five or six times at least to date, and I’ll definitely read it again before I croak. I’ve notably read several times, and enjoyed each time through, many of the books mentioned here – The 39 Steps, Rogue Male, King Solomon’s Mines, several Holmes and Wooster yarns, Greene’s The Comedians, one or two of Patrick Leigh Fermour’s travel stories.

    But as far as I can see no-one has yet mentioned the book that I’ve read the largest number of times. I must have gleefully opened its first page, oh, easily more than a dozen times.

    “Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars……..”

    • I couldn’t read either now. I know many can and do but for me they no longer hold the allure they once did. I used to read a lot more Sci-fi and fantasy during my teenage years but it I only very occasionally indulge nowadays depending upon my mood.

    • It’s fine of course. I struggled through LOTR in my teens on the urgent recommendation of friends but found it a tremendous bore. The same goes for the films – I didn’t like the first but thought I might have been in the wrong mood as I had a bad cold, so I went to see the second and, for the only time in my life, fell asleep in the cinema (I remember waking up for a tremendous battle scene at the end though). I still haven’t seen the third. As is clear on this and the film list the Tolkien universe is doing just fine without anyone having to pretend they like it.

      • I gave up halfway through the first film as I found it pretty tedious. I was watching a German dubbed version that probably didn’t help. I couldn’t believe that he made a three long films of The Hobbit from a one book source and didn’t try to watch those.

        However I really liked They Shall Not Grow Old and Get Back.

      • I have a wide spread of offspring. For nearly twenty years of cinema-going, the best film I saw was The Incredibles. I am well used to childish tedium but LOTR takes the biscuit. I lost the best part of three hours of my life every year for three successive years (managed to swerve The Hobbit). I was grateful as one child after another needed a toilet break. They were a blessed relief and not just because I needed to go too.

    • Far from alone. I’m not actually sure I know anyone who has read it! I certainly haven’t. I thought the films were ok, worth watching, but I wouldn’t watch a second time and wouldn’t bother with the book. The whole wizards and elves world appeals to me about as little as super-hero films and comics.

      • Struggling with my third read through of LOR (first for many a year) and as for the films – first was simply dreadful and you couldn’t pay enough me to watch the rest.
        As an aside, I am forced once a year to watch Sound of Music – it’s grown on me, I may be in love with dear Julie

  39. Most of the books on my shelves are worth re-reading. Otherwise they wouldn’t still be there.
    Most of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld stories, apart from possibly the first couple, before he got into his stride.
    Most of Iain Banks novels and most of his Iain M. Banks sci-fi stuff. Only a very few that failed to work.
    Chris (formerly Christopher) Brookmyre has had a pretty good run of novels. Only one complete dud IMO. His Ambrose Parry series of Victorian medical-themed books, written with his wife, Mariza Haetzman, are all pretty good so far.
    Carl Hiaasen’s Florida-based comic crime stuff was excellent until falling off a bit recently.
    James Ellroy’s stuff is a bit hit-and-miss but always worth the effort.
    Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series has been mostly superb. The few others of his that I’ve read have been good.
    Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels have been similarly superb. Quite a few others of his on my shelves have been good.
    Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay” and “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” are superb.
    Ian Rankin’s Rebus series is good solid stuff.
    LeCarre.
    Deighton.
    Gaiman (despite his revealed horribleness)
    Douglas Adams.
    Jo Nesbo.
    Vonnegut.
    Mick Herron.
    Jane Harper (so far).

    • Further proof (if it were needed!) that I’ve been off my game recently is the fact that I forgot le Carré. I’ve read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People many, many times. The others as well, of course – but those two are far and away the most frequently read.

      • Oh yes. I had been neglecting Honourable Schoolboy due to some foggy idea that it was hard going but I reread all the books featuring Smiley in order and tremendously enjoyed HS. Joss Ackland was brilliant as Jerry in the Beeb adaptation. I wish they’d dramatised that with him in the key role but apparently the Far East locations made it too expensive.

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