Books You've Read More Than Once

Obviously, I'll have to start with "In Cold Blood"
a few others:

Bowden's "Black Hawk Down"
Bissinger's "Friday Night Lights"
John Irving's "Prayer for Owen Meany"
"The Great Gatsby"

and soon:
Thompson's "Hell's Angels"

 

Pretty much all of Dan Jenkins' novels (Baja Oklahoma and You Gotta Play Hurt many, many times) as well as his collection of columns You Call it Sports but I say it's a Jungle out There.

Several of Larry McMurtry's non-Westerns like The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Some Can Whistle and Duane's Depressed (I saw a sequel to Duane's Depressed called When the Light Goes on my last trip to the bookstore).

Another author I got hooked on is George MacDonald Fraser, who is still cranking out The Flashman Papers (I didn't realize until recently that a 12th book in the series came out a year or so ago). When I started collecting the series, I'd go back and reread all the previous titles in order of release so I would be caught up on all the backstory details.

Fraser also has one called The Pyrates that was made to be read in a hammock on a tropical beach with a goodly supply of drink on hand. (Actually, I only got to read it that way once.)

Box Socials may be my favorite W.P. Kinsella book, and I've gone through Heinlein's Glory Road more than once.

As for guilty pleasures, I've done all the Harry Potter books at least twice (like with Flashman, I reread them in order) and there are a couple of dozen titles by Anne McCaffrey around here somewhere (I went back through the Planet Pirates series a few months ago).

A couple I read multiple times in high school were Free as a Running Fox by T.D. Calnan (a memoir of his days as a POW during WWII and his multiple escape attempts) and The Mouse That Roared by Leonard Wibberley.

 

bissinger is a lying fuck. as chris gove. i believe gove.

 

Two recent releases I've added to my annual list with "All The President's Men," "Boys on the Bus," "You Gotta Play Hurt" and a couple of others ...

***"The Tender Bar"

***"Hemingway on Writing"

 

Of course, "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Things They Carried," "Catcher in the Rye," and "The Great American Novel"

Plus:

"The Right Stuff" and "Bonfire of the Vanities"
"Robert Kennedy--A Memoir" by Newfield
"Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72"
"Damage" by Josephine Hart
"Endless Love" by Scott Spencer
"A False Spring" by Pat Jordan
"Eight Men Out"
"The Autobiography of Malcolm X"

and, appropriately enough, "Time and Again" by Jack Finney

 

To Kill A Mockingbird

 

I like biographies. To that end...

"When Pride Still Mattered," about Vince Lombardi
"Seabiscuit," impressive both for the quality of the book and the incredible effort it must have taken to write it (the writer has chronic fatigue)
"John Adams"
"Theodore Rex", about Roosevelt's term as president. It's part of a trilogy and I aim to read the first part this summer. The final book hasn't been completed yet.

One of these days I'm going to read "The World According to Garp" again. A fanTASTIC book.

 

When I was real young, a little-leaguer, I read Bill Giest's "Little League Confidential" twice. It was a great read about the personalities of little-leaguers, that really hit home with me.

 

Absolutely LOVED "Animal Farm." Have reread it several times, and might try again this summer. It's much easier to breeze through a book like that, that's fairly short and can be read in a day or two, than something like "The Stand". For as good as "The Stand" is, 1,200 pages is a lot of damn reading. The first and only time I read it straight through, it took me most of the summer. Occasionally, I will pick it up and read bits and pieces of it though.

Others:

"The Call of the Wild," by Jack London. I think the first real book I ever read twice. I remember sitting in 8th grade English class and finding a slimmed-down version buried in the back of the textbook. I read it on my own while the rest of the class was reading something else.

"How to be a Superhero" ... can't remember the authors off the top of my head, but just a funny book from the early 90s that pokes fun at a lot of the superhero mythos. Sadly, it's out of print. Makes me glad I bought it way back when.

"100 Decisive Battles" ... again, can't remember the author. Basically, an overview of 100 battles that shaped history from about 1,400 B.C. all the way up to Desert Storm. It's a great toilet book. Pick it up, read a random chapter or two whilst on the crapper, and pick it up again next time without being lost or confused.

 

"The Bachman Books" by Stephen King

also several of Bukowski's books (Love Is A Dog From Hell, etc., etc., etc.)

 

Actually the book I read the most times had to be when I was in like fifth and sixth grade. Baseball Fever. I must have read that like 80 times in those two years.

 

I think I've read The Long Walk about 20 times. Never gets old.