What Books Do You Reread?

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST,John
Date: 25 Oct 03 - 01:24 PM

Earth Abides .. one of those aftermath of catastrophy books.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy .. another of those aftermath of catastrophy books.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Miken
Date: 25 Oct 03 - 05:03 PM

Every two or three years I re-read most of Dickens, and much of Mark Twain; neither of which ever get old for me.
Also: all of Annie Proulx, LOTR, Frank O'Conner.
Just re-read Jack Whyte's series about Arthur.
Others.....Ursula Leguin,Edward Rutherfurd's Sarum, The Forest, and London; and not long ago, a series of children's books I had read,as a chold by Thornton W. Burgess ( Bowser the Hound, Old mother West Wind, etc.)

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Gareth
Date: 25 Oct 03 - 07:40 PM

Nye Bevan - "In Place of Fear" - Jenny Lee - "A Candle in the Darkness" - Sorry UK politics - My Guiding lights !!

Gerry Fiennes - "I tried to run a Railway" An amusing, and wise tale of management 'C**k Ups'.

C S Forester - All and every !

Patrick O'Brian.

And Pratchett - who on the rough, self selected sample here wins outright.

Gareth

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: robinia
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 01:19 AM

Mary Webb's "Precious Bane" -- what can I tell you about it, except I found it on my mother's bookshelf as a teenager and could not open it at any page, then or later, without going on to the end. It cast that kind of a spell, like an old ballad, rare and lovely and true and on the knife edge of "corniness" . . . And I loved introducing it to my teenage daughters, i.e., their reading the book aloud to me on a long interstate highway trip between Huntington WV and Pittsburgh PA, the kind of driving I hate, but this trip I wanted to go on and on or at least until we got to the 'raising of Venus' . . . Î so wanted to hear their reaction to it; instead one of them piped up with "Mother, why are we only going 35 mph?"
Read this book under (or in) an apple tree or perhaps in a meadow . . .   
          robinia

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Lonesome EJ
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 01:42 AM

Moby Dick I have re-read many times, including a marathon read-aloud with an exgirlfriend on a trip to the Bahamas. And yes, a lot of it does crack me up. I get a kick out of the way the second mate calls Queequeg "Quohog", and the sermon delivered by the cook to the sharks is hilarious.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Stephen L. Rich
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 08:48 AM

I re-read almost anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Douglas R. Hofstadter, James Thurber, or Jack Douglas. From time to time I will also return to Charles Dickens's "Hard Times".

Stephen Lee

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 11:49 AM

In the realm of science fiction, anything by C.J. Cherryh! What a MARVELOUS writer she is!

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Cluin
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 05:27 PM

Most everything by W.O. Mitchell.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST,pdq
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 05:47 PM

Anything by John Steinbeck, especially "Cannery Row" and its sequel "Sweet Thursday". His characters are truly old California, a place which no longer exists.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Thomas the Rhymer
Date: 26 Oct 03 - 06:29 PM

Dostoyevski, Gurdjieff, Swift, De Tocqueville, Voltaire, Doyle, Blavatsky, (Sir Albert) Howard, Nearing, Sholokov, Childe, Franklin, (Alasdair) Gray, Hesse, Dumas... ttr

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: alison
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 02:30 AM

anything by Peter Mayle (Year in Provence etc...)
Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, & Frenchman's Creek - Daphne du Maurier
the "Cross stitch" series - by diana gabaldon as mentioned above (some of the books are better than other... but the good ones are GREAT!!)
the Narnia Chronicles - C.S. Lewis


slainte

alison

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Gurney
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 03:29 AM

As a boy, Coral Island by R.M.Ballantyne.
Everything by Dick Francis.
The Earth Children series by Jean M.Auel.
The Tower and Hive series by Anne McCaffery.
The Cadfael Chronicles by Ellis Peters.
Most of Terry Pratchett.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein


Escapism all. I skim at first, and take it slower and deeper if I enjoy it.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 06:12 AM

OK, so here's an extension of this question....

If the book is part of a series, do you re-read the whole series in sequence from start to finish or do you just read the one book?

I'm a whole series person myself. Can't understand those people who just pick up at random.

LTS

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: jacqui.c
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 09:36 AM

Difficult really not to start at the beginning and work through - you don't pick up the thread of the story properly otherwise and there's history that you are unaware of. I recently read LOTR and the Dune series and wouldn't have made sense of either set of books if I hadn't read from the start. It helped as well having read The Hobbitt.

I've now been recommended Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy which I'm hoping to start when I have to have a minor op. in November. Has anyone read them and what did you think?

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 01:07 PM

They are Great. I am sure you'll love them. They are much better, in my opinion, than the Harry Potter Books.
As for Pratchett, I hate his stuff it is not very good writing and is a bit condescending...but to each his own.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Joe_F
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 05:19 PM

Read to a frazzle:
George Orwell: 1984; Collected Essays, Letters, & Journalism
William Bradford Huie: The Revolt of Mamie Stover
Arthur Koestler: autobiographical books; Darkness at Noon
Lewis Carroll: the Alice books
H. L. Mencken: journalism & diary, passim
James Agee: A Death in the Family
many others

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 27 Oct 03 - 06:52 PM

Liz, as to series re-reading, the question isn't quite that way with me.

When I'm out of fresh books to read, I start hunting through bookshelves and cabinets in three different rooms in the house, striving to avoid thrashing around on the floor in withdrawal symptoms.

Now, all my Tolkien books are NOT together, nor are all my C.J. Cherryh books shelved in the same place, and so on; they are where they were shoved the last time I read them. So I go through a shelf or a cabinet and I see lots of my Beautiful Wife's books and lots of kids' books left over from days of yore, and a scattering of my own b ooks, and I see (we'll say) Tolkien's The Unfinished Tales.

"Do I want to read that right now? Umm, no. What else is here? Okay, here's the last volume of Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King. Okay, let's read that!" I don't have to read the preceding volumes, because I have a good recollection of them from the other seven times I read them.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: jacqui.c
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 09:30 AM

Dave
If you HADN'T read the books before would you still have as good an understanding of the story? you paint a great picture of your book collection - I don't think I'd want to live in a house without books - it just wouldn't be a home to me!

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 11:11 AM

This great thread moved me to go looking for a copy of Roald Dahl's collection Someone Like You. Found it through Alibris for around $4, after shipping it was all of $7 and change. It arrived in the mail this morning, a used hardback, no dust jacket, flyspecked but in great shape. (The little owner plate in front says it was owned by a fellow from Beverly Hills, California.) The stories in here are masterful, and the arrangement is such that they do amount to a quite complex whole when you finish reading them.

Thanks for the great reminder of books we want to reread! This one is going beside my lamp and reading chair.

SRS

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: AliUK
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 11:19 AM

Normally, if it´s a series of books I´ll start at the beginning. This sometimes is a pain in the arse for me living here in Brazil as the bookstores that sell books in English will have maybe the middle book of the series and not the rest. Or, as has just happened, the first book and I know for certain that the rest will ot follow. seeing as I don´t have an international credit card and it would be prohibitively expensive to order from the internet it leaves me in a quandry. I miss out on some great stories because I just put the books back on the shelves.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST,creole jack
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 12:42 PM

My wife and I read to each at bedtime. We have read and re-read
Stranger in a Stranger Land by Joseph Heinlein
A Conferacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Grimm's Fairy Tales (WELL! We like them)
Poetry by numerous writers

We have read (but will probably not re-read)
Harry Potter Series
Lord of the Rings Series

When we don't read to each other we make up stories about our cats and their supposed adventures. I am currently writing these down (on computer) and will investigate the possibility of a book. Jack

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: joe hill
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 03:30 PM

The Earth by Emile Zola

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Sam L
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 04:36 PM

I like Nabokov in a particular way, and re-read some of his stuff.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: DonMeixner
Date: 28 Oct 03 - 11:31 PM

Louis L'Amour- The Sacketts and Bendigo Shafter, Iron Marshall, Comstock Lode

William Shakespeare- The Tempest, Henry V

Robert Heinlein- Everything

Dick Francis-Everything

Jonathan Gash- Lovejoy

Jack Kirby- The Fourth World Tetralogy, The Monster Comics

Mark Schultz-Xenozoic Tales

Don

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST
Date: 29 Oct 03 - 07:55 AM

A sequel to SILVERLOBK? Tell me about it.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 29 Oct 03 - 12:35 PM

Jacqui C. said:

If you HADN'T read the books before would you still have as good an understanding of the story?

Well, of course this thread is about re-reading books. But to answer your question (somewhat):

I wouldn't, in retrospect, have wanted to read The Lord of the Rings out of order, but if I had, I think each of the books is fairly free-standing. There is absolutely NO necessity to have read The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings. While it has some of the same-named (but somewhat different) characters and shares the same Middle Earth history, it's a different kettle of fish altogether, and is not nearly as satisfying a read. And its story is not in any way a necessary background of knowledge for LOTR.

The other author I've mentioned here a couple times is C.J. Cherryh. She has written several series (along with many single books), and each of the books of each of those series stands alone very nicely.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: kendall
Date: 29 Oct 03 - 08:02 PM

SILVERLOCK, that is.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Burke
Date: 29 Oct 03 - 08:22 PM

LOTR is really one book in 3 volumes so it would be hard to read it out of order the first time. I reordered my reading of v.2-3 to follow the story straight on one side of the river, then the other.

Some other series are written so that the stories stand alone, others don't. With some SF writers, it's more like they create a world and set lots of stories in it so each is pretty independent of the others.

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 10:59 AM

I occasionally find myself rereading a book without realizing that I've read it before. The title won't ring a bell so I'll start reading it and then realize that I've read it before. The logical thing to do would be to put the book down and choose another, but more often than not I'll realize that I don't remember a damned thing about it, particularly how it ended. This phenomenon is limited to books of popular fiction. It never happens with "serious literature". Furthermore, there are some authors whose work seems to stick in my mind clearly while others' tend to get foggy. For example, within the horror/occult mystery field, I can clearly recall the basic story line and outcome of every Stephen King novel I've ever read, but Peter Straub's books fade from memory pretty quickly. It takes second readings to place them firmly in memory.

Bruce

Subject: RE: What Books Do You Reread?
From: GUEST,Kim C no cookie
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 05:40 PM

Don, I absolutely LOVE the Sacketts.

LH, our local newspaper started carrying Get Fuzzy about a year or so ago. At first I thought it was very strange, but it grew on me like a barnacle. I love its quirkiness. One of my favorites is where Bucky wanted to be a gladiator, and Satchel wanted to call him Gluteus Maximus.