<p>Marian,
We are kindred spirits. I LOVE Rosamunde Pilcher and have all of her books that have been published in the US. Coming Home is one of my favorite books of all time.</p>
<p>Avoidingwork–give Middlemarch another try! I’ve read it probably 5/6 times. I think George Eliot is one of the wisest people who ever wrote, and fantastically good at making characters real and understanding what motivates them.</p>
<p>Totally Pride & Prejudice…in fact, I have it on my iPod, read by Kate Reading…and I listen to it over and over and over…sometimes just snippets of it, Kate does a great job with the voices, and I find the vocabulary captivating…</p>
<p>I love Anne of Green Gables and have read all of Montgomery’s books more than once… simplistic easy read but “delightful” tone to her books…not unlike Rosamund Pilchner’s Shell Seekers and September…</p>
<p>I have read Ayn Rand books multiple times…We the Living is one of my favorites…</p>
<p>I have not reread John Adams, but it was my introduction into biography as history as an adult…and I went on a major tear, reading about Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt etc etc…John Adams is without a doubt the most important read of my life…I would say that Franklin and Eleanor is #2…Gore Vidal’s Lincoln is up there also…</p>
<p>Trinity has been read 3 times…once it came across as a religious story, another time I gleaned the politics as dominating and finally enjoyed just as a love story…</p>
<p>I really love Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth and have read it several times…and enjoyed World without End, but Pillars has stayed with me all these years…</p>
<p>I have read “And Ladies of the Club” more than once…and may try to get it on iTunes. </p>
<p>I always pick up books at our local library book sale…I call them my desperation books, ones that I will read when desperate and have nothing else… I have made several notes of the authors cited in this thread…sometimes I think of myself as more of a serial reader, if I find an author I like, I read everything by them… I was glad I didn’t discover Ann Rice until all the vampire books were done, so I could bolt from book to book, same is true with Elizabeth George, who I discovered halfway thru her Inspector Lynley series…which we watch on public television also, when on…</p>
<p>Sax, I have read Terry Brooks. The Shannara series has a little too much angst, and a little too much “reality” for me, I’ve read a lot of them, some more than once, and I know I ought to enjoy them, but not so much. I actually like his “Magic Kingdom for Sale” series better than Shannara.
The things that link Bujold, Eddings, Sayers, Heyer and company back to their “motherhouse” - Austen - is the dialogue, the occasional laugh out loud funny moments and the strong characters that you actually care to revisit every so often. I think they have a lot in common as authors although their subject matter differs, and their talent obviously differs. If you like one you will probably like the others. Others that fit into this mold are Alexandre Dumas 3 musketeers and Th White The Once and Future King, particularly the middle section about the Questing Beast, some of the finest comic dialog ever written.
My DH would say Wodehouse should be listed, but the original group (notably except for Jane Austen herself), aren’t at all writing satire. Sorry, I love to talk books.</p>
<p>I reread Lord of the Rings, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and To Kill a Mockingbird every 5 to 7 years. Just like to refresh the details.</p>
<p>I don’t like to re-read, and often have trouble making it through the first time. I’m pretty picky about what I read all the way through. I’m very disappointed when I bring a book home from the library and discover a couple pages into it that I’ve read it - or abandoned it - previously.</p>
<p>For some reason, though, I can re-read “kid novels” like Chronicles of Narnia or Madeline L’Engle books and enjoy them every time.</p>
<p>Sadly, I re-read the entire Harry Potter series each summer. Each books goes really quick, but I occasionally find a detail I don’t remember. Once I read the series in reverse order. Was not nearly as good.</p>
<p>I am a non-stop and non-discriminating rereader: Lois Bujold McMasters (yeah those of you who posted up thread!) & Octavia Butler, Dorthy Sayers & Sarah Caldwell (if you love the one, the other will have you rolling on the floor!) Elizabeth Peters, Janet Evanovich, Ann Rice’s vampire and witch novels, Candace Bushnell, various chick lit & soft core bodice rippers. Stephen King. Tom Wolfe. Erica Jong. Joyce Carole Oates. and John Kirk’s “The Impecunious House Restorer” (non-fiction) For me a book read at age 40 was a completely different experience than the same book at age 30 or 20, and now in my 50’s I often don’t even realize it is a reread till ¾ of the way through, which has been a delightful surprise in many ways. Last summer when I told one of my sons how much I was enjoying Joyce Maynard’s “At Home in the World”, he reminded me that I not only had read it when it came out but had tried to pass my copy on to him before donating it to the library like most of the contemporary fiction I purchase when the library wait list is too long. I usually reread when traveling: in my teens F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Brontes, in my 20’s Salinger, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf; my 30’s are a blur but I remember rereading Toni Morrison, Alice Walker – and to my children the entire Lord of the Ring series out loud more than once and Sue Miller’s “Family Pictures” countless times – for some reason everyone I knew was reading and rereading this book-- along with Carolyn Heilbrun’s “Writing a Woman’s Life”; in my 40’s Henry James, Thackery and Nabokov (especially “Ada”; and now in my 50’s Edith Wharton and Zora Neale Hurston are frequently in my carry-on. And always when I visit my rural southern ancestral home place: Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy, together with (ever since it was published) Lalita Tademy’s “Cane River”. The dead white males I have been constantly rereading for more than 30 years are Trollope and Proust. The Proust will not sound quite so pretentious when I confess to having never been either intelligent or industrious enough to learn enough French to read “Remembrance of Things Past” in the original so that I actually can read the real book… even though I think it may be one of the great masterpieces of all time and certainly one of those books someone can enjoy in different ways at different stages of life. Right now the ending makes me weep; at 20 it moved me not a bit. The women authors are too numerous to list but Austen is a perennial favorite. I reread Margaret Atwood. In my opinion she is absolutely fascinating and constantly maturing in her story telling. I read “The Edible Woman” in my early 20’s and have been hooked ever since, sort of feeling we have grown up together. My favorite new author to reread: Rebecca West. I only discovered her the last few years (unless I just don’t remember reading her decades ago) and am currently reading “The Fountain Overflows” for the third time.</p>
<p>The only book I can come up with that I absolutely couldn’t and wouldn’t reread (having barely made it through the first time, after making several attempts over several years) is “American Psycho”, but I have reread other works by Ellis. Probably I would never reread Orson Scott Card’s “The Lost Boys”, which also utterly creeped me out. And I would find it extremely difficult to reread Dan Brown but not because of any creep factor.</p>
<p>IMHO the one of the best things about rereading is you can comfortably go to bed at the correct time even if you haven’t gotten to the ending – of course, assuming you remember it from the first reading.</p>
<p>I have also forgotten how to do italics in this forum</p>
<p>Maybe I should give The Great Gatsby another look. I remember reading it in high school, but don’t remember being wowed by it.</p>
<p>Speak Memory (Nabokov)
Anna Karenina
Portrait of a Lady
all of Jane Austen</p>
<p>katalia - I’m with you on the Jane Austens. I’ve read them all multiple times and I find something fresh every time I read them.</p>
<p>I also have read Herman Wouk’s - The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance a number of times.</p>
<p>Also:</p>
<p>Vanity Fair by Thakeray
anything by Eliot, Wharton. James or Bronte
I also love Tolkein’s The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy
and last but not least - I love Stephen King’s The Stand</p>
<p>I love just about everything, every genre (except hard core sci-fi) but those are some of my favorites.</p>
<p>Ender’s Game
The Sparrow
All of Bujold’s Miles V. books
Laurie King’s Russell & Holmes series (yay - new one coming out on Tuesday!!)
Crystal Singer by Anne McAffrey (don’t ask me why, just sort of like ocmfort food for some reason…)
Pride & Prejudice</p>
<p>And from childhood (but loved reading them to my kids, and did so multiple times):
The Adventure Children series by Enid Blyton
Enchantress from the Stars by Sylvia Engdahl</p>
<p>Am I the only human being who cannot read Tolkein? I couldn’t get through any of them even though I have tried countless times. And I will read just about anything. I think I have read just about everything mentioned here (love Faulkner, reread Flannery O’Connor every couple years), but for some reason I just cannot stomach Tolkein.</p>
<p>That being said, neither one of my kids was crazy about his works, although they both read them all.</p>
<p>^ I’m not so crazy about Tolkien, either. And this seems like a good time to confess that I never made it beyond the second Harry Potter book. But many of the other titles listed on this thread are among my favorites.</p>
<p>^^absolutely not a Tolkien fan either; but having made the mistake of telling my pre-readers that I didn’t care for him they automatically assumed he must be worth reading and it is one of the many examples of the sacrifices I am willing to make for my children that I read and re-read them out loud repeatedly over the course of a couple of years. My children could recite many passages from memory and I learned to read out loud while going someplace far far away in my head. </p>
<p>Flannery O’Connor was a great addition to the list!</p>
<p>And I will add:
Willa Cather
Eudora Welty
Walker Percy</p>
<p>I’ve always been a re-reader, and I have a tendency to break the spine on my books. Here are a few that I’d pick up again today, if I had the time.</p>
<p>Another vote for the Narnia series.
The Earthsea Trilogy.
Animal Farm.
Toolmaker Koan.
Watership Down.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Anything about photography by John Shaw or Monte Zucker.
I’ll re-read Atlas Shrugged this summer, after my son’s finished with it.</p>
<p>And I’m particularly fond of Vince Flynn’s novel, Term Limits. :D</p>
<p>All Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyle
( I don’t reread them but love Laurie R. King’s Holmes books.)
Before Adam and White Fang- Jack London
Dicey books by Cynthia Voight
Definately The Secret Garden
Golden Compass series by Phillip Pullman
Illiad and sometimes Oddysey, Richmond Lattimore translation
Also, Middlemarch has to be one of the best things ever written, but along with Moby Dick, I can only reread it once every other decade or so.</p>
<p>ALH! Another Sarah Caldwell fan! Thrilled to meet you! And I agree some books read totally differntly at various ages. Case in point for me: Middlemarch and Portrait of a Lady. Love Great Gatsby but reread it for book groups only. And Lolita, how I love Lolita and how easy it is to reread and find new surprising things everytime.</p>
<p>
No. When we were first married, I read everything in my husband’s collection except Tolkein. And I tried really hard. I will read almost anything else. I also can’t read Harry Potter.</p>
<p>I, too love to reread. Every so often I go through the Laura Ingall Wilder books (Little House). I love Jane Austen and no one beats Maeve Binchy when I need comfort reading but I don’t care for Tara Road either. Cangel, I also like Dave Eddings and his series. And I like to reread Stephen King’s Dark Tower series too.</p>