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That book that you reread?

wasapi

Penultimate Amazing
wasapi
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
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There are not too many books I will reread, but I have some. Of course there are a couple of books of poetry, Mainly Galway Kinnell , Dorthey Parker, some in Portuguese.

The books, A Hundred Years of Solitude, some old Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler books, are all I can think of now, but I know there are others.

You?
 
The Sherlock Holmes stories.
Alas Babylon by Pat Frank.
Most anything by H. Beam Piper.
A. Bertram Chandlers' Rim Worlds stories, but only the early ones, and about once a decade.
 
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How can you reread a book when you already know the ending?

Is what I used to hear a lot, from people who found out I did that. And didn't read for pleasure.

It's been a long time since I reread a book but I still have quite a stack of unread stuff to get to. I'm just getting to some comics that have been in my boxes since about 2002. (I used to buy a lot of them.) It is slightly amusing to come across an ad for a new comtemporary computer or video game system and see how little memory it holds.

The last book I remember rereading is perhaps The Tripods Trilogy.
 
Harry Potter.
Lord of the Rings. (also The Hobbit and The Silmarillion)

In fact, I lost count of the number of times I had reread LoTR by the time I was fourteen.
 
A 1932 print of The Bounty trilogy, the US and British versions of the HHttG by Douglas Adams, all the Mission Earth books at least thrice, several by Umberto Eco and Tom Clancy.

Not exactly the most intellectual stuff out there but it was what held my interests.

My wife reads poetry of the past century and it repels me in two pages. Mostly Mexican poets.
 
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wasapi said:
There are not too many books I will reread, but I have some. Of course there are a couple of books of poetry, Mainly Galway Kinnell , Dorthey Parker, some in Portuguese.

The books, A Hundred Years of Solitude, some old Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler books, are all I can think of now, but I know there are others.

You?
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There are virtually no books I do NOT re-read. Obviously that's just me. I probably read The Lord Of The Rings ten times in ten years. But haven't in quite a while, perhaps I'll do that. I'm currently halfway through the third of the Brother Cadfael series. For the fifth or sixth time.

I used to read a lot of SF, but not much any more. I've done all of Discworld at least twice in a couple of years. I read and re-read a lot of naval historical fiction, having been hooked on it by Hornblower years ago.
 
alfaniner said:
How can you reread a book when you already know the ending?

Is what I used to hear a lot, from people who found out I did that. And didn't read for pleasure.
Click to expand...

The answer, of course, is that you can see a lot of the foreshadowing stuff that you missed before. In the Brother Cadfael I'm now re-reading, Monk's Hood, the motive is a dispute over a manor. There have been several hints about the key fact that the manor is in Wales, but it hasn't come out yet.

And there's always other stuff you've missed. I know a lot more about 18th/19th century sailing warships now than when I first read Hornblower. Of course, that's not always a good thing -- I spot mistakes by the authors that went by me before.
 
A lot. You generally get a lot more from multiple reads.

Certainly my favourite authors I will re-read many times out of sheer pleasure. Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Ursula LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Patrick O'Brian, Carol O'Connell, Laurie King, Charles Dickens, William Horwood. I could go on ;)
 
I used to reread LOTR on a regular basis. At some point, I realized I'd finally read it enough.

I've re-read Iain Banks's main Culture sequence at least once. I'll probably go back to it at least once more. Speaking of Banks, reading his later family dramas always felt like I was re-reading The Crow Road.

I re-read most of what I consider "peak Stephen King" every few years. What I think of as the "Castle Rock" period. It, Tommyknockers, Pet Sematary, The Shining. You know, the good stuff. I re-read the early Dark Tower stuff at least once, building up to the publication of the final books. But once I'd been through the door at the top of the tower... Never again.

Lately I've been working my way through a lot of the 60s crime authors. The working writers who cranked out a genre novel or two a year to pay the bills. Those all kinda feel like re-reading the same story, since they're pretty formulaic and try not to evolve the main character out of a moneymaking state.
 
arthwollipot said:
Heretic! There is no such thing as too much LoTR!
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Moderation in all things.

After you've read it ten times in ten years. After you've read it so many times you've read all the passages you used to skip or skim. After you've read it so many times that you're skipping or skimming the passages you used to look forward to reading. After that? Maybe it's time to give it a rest for a decade or two. Let it steep in the recesses of your memory long enough for the familiarity to fade, and for something new to hopefully shake loose.
 
Recently, the only book series I reread was David Weber's Safehold.

I had originally read the series up to volume 9 some years ago, so when I bought volume 10, I refreshed my memory of 1-9!

So, OK not a complete reread...
 
Any book I liked reading I like enough to re-read. I still have most of my best books I had in childhood, reading them is like visiting old friends. I cannot imagine not reading a good book repeatedly.
 
London Fields by Martin Amis, four or five times. I know the story of course, but Amis, IMHO is a master of language and structure, and there is a heap of dark humour.
 
I’ve been rereading books I read as a kid. For example: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory/Great Glass Elevator; IT; On a Pale Horse, Xanth Series (Piers Anthony). That’s been a recent kick just to see how my adult mind might catch things I didn’t back then.

I have reread almost every book by Harlan Coben; mostly because I really enjoyed them while reading them but then found that I couldn’t remember them. I don’t know why that is; it only happens with Coben. Must be something about his writing style.
 
I've reread some of the classics, including just about everything by Shakespeare, and everything by Jane Austen. A few Vonneguts, after a very long period. A few Conrads. The Secret Agent and Victory are favorites and I think I've read those three or four times over the last 50 years. A couple I've read multiple times, not for the plot but for the language, include Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. I'm not sure short story collections quite qualify, but I've reread a fair amount of Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Angela Carter, I.B. Singer, V.S. Pritchett, and others. Most of those stories are not the sort of thing where you forget the plot as there may not be one really, but want to refresh your memory on how they said it. Oh, and Saki. Gotta read the best of Saki a few times in a lifetime.
 
theprestige said:
Moderation in all things.

After you've read it ten times in ten years. After you've read it so many times you've read all the passages you used to skip or skim. After you've read it so many times that you're skipping or skimming the passages you used to look forward to reading. After that? Maybe it's time to give it a rest for a decade or two. Let it steep in the recesses of your memory long enough for the familiarity to fade, and for something new to hopefully shake loose.
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Now that somebody mentioned fiction, a thought occurred to me. The above is how I feel about nonfiction books. The Blind Watchmaker, for example. I feel that I have already learned everything I can from that book, and no longer feel the desire to reread it.

But fiction? Fiction is like art. I can go back to a beautiful painting again and again and appreciate its beauty. I can listen to a great piece of music again and again. And I can read LoTR again and again without getting tired of it. In fact, my appreciation of a work of art can actually deepen with familiarity.

That's the difference. Not trying to imply that your thoughts on the subject are any less valid (and I hope it is clear that my "heretic!" quip was a joke) but that's how it works in my mind.
 
I've re-read Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Taylor, Nick Hornby, Ian McEwan, Daphne Du Maurier and Iris Murdoch quite a few times and a couple of other Elizabeths (names escape me). I revisit classics now and then such as Mill on the Floss, the Brontes and Catcher in the Rye. I love Jack Kerouac and often reread Dharma Bums , likewise Kurt Vonnegut Junior Cat's Cradle and Breakfast of Champions.

Oh and Kazuo Ishiguro, a British-Japanese author whose parents are from Nagasaki so we get the Japanese viewpoint of Pearl Harbour. He is a very fine writer.
 
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I have reread many, many books. One of the benefits of re-reading is actually because the story doesn't come as much of a surprise, you can see what the writer was doing and understand how the story was put together. The first time through I mostly read for plot.

Another benefit is that you come at stories differently at different ages. When you're older you may start to pick up things that you might have missed because you hadn't had the life experiences yet.

I will happily reread any PG Wodehouse books, because of course the plot is not the point with Plum--it's the language which still manages to surprise me. I reread Doestoyevsky because it is the little dialogues in his stories which are so prescient about what would happen later in the real world.
 
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