Books You've Read More Than Once

Man, if you can read Faulkner once, much less more than once, you're a far smarter man than I. His stuff seems impenetrable to me.

Now, Robert Penn Warren is a completely different kettle of fish. "Blackberry Winter" remains one of my favorite all-time short stories.

 

most Henry Miller novels
most Bukowski novels

Garcia Marquez "A Hundred Years of Solitude"
Isabel Allende "The House of Spirits"
Alfredo Vea Jr. "La Maravilla"

Larry McMurtry Houston trilogy

most Knut Hamsun Novels
Pasternak "Doctor Zhivago"
Pushkin "Eugene Onegin"

 

On my short list of favorites and have read it at least four times.

Also on this list of books I've read at least three times (I honestly couldn't begin to tell how many I've read twice)

Things Fall Apart
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
Pride and Prejudice (not by choice...one of the major regrets of being an English Lit major)
Playing for Knight (Steve Alford's account of his basketball playing career)

 

I thought it was really good. Not as good as "Clockers", which would be hard to top, but "Lush Life" was a very solid read.

 

If you're taken by "The Wire"-style dialogue, you'll like it just fine.

 

I think it is fairly apparent that I am a fan of "The Wire".

 

Lonesome Dove. The minute I finish reading it, I'm ready to read it all over again.

 

Agreed. I read "Absalom, Absalom" once. No way I would want to read it again. I've never been a fan of writers who go out of their way to make their work as difficult as possible just because they can.

 

Naked
Me Talk Pretty One Day
The Road
Catcher In the Rye
Childhood's End
Slaughterhouse Five

 

Just off the top of my head....

Childhood's End
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Harry Potter books (three or four times so far)
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Catcher in the Rye
Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler.. fab!)
The Deryni trilogies by Katherine Kurtz
Zane Grey's trio of books about early Ohio
Anne Frank's Diary
The Power of One
The Hotel New Hampshire
The Lords of Discipline
The Great Santini
Prince of Tides
The Stand
It
Salem's Lot
Gone with the Wind
The Biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder
All the Wilder books (granted, much younger then)

Not off the top of my head
Handmaid's Tale
The Hitchhiker Series
Lord of the Flies
The Great Gatsby
The Bachman Books.. love, love, love The Long Walk
a short story in some old sci-fi thing called .. Baby is Three

re-read many in my younger day, such as...
Swiss Family Robinson
Wizard of Oz
The Jungle Book
Flight of the White Wolf
I am 15 and I don't want to die.

I've always compulsively re-read. And most of these, it's more than twice. Childhood's End must be six or seven times.

 

Second that. Lush Life was good. But no Clockers.

As for books I've read twice (or more), most that spring to mind are 20th Century American classics:

Various Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath, Tortilla Flat, Mice and Men)
On the Road, Dharma Bums
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Old Man and the Sea
Invisible Man
All the King's Men
Dispatches
Into the Wild
Blood Meridian
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Commitments, and a Star Called Henry (Irish, not American, by Roddy Doyle)
And I try to read William Zinsser's On Writing Well on an annual basis.

 

Hmmmmm ...

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Catch-22
The Fifties
Requiem for a Dream
Friday Night Lights
Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero
Namath
A Season On The Brink
When Pride Still Mattered
Pond Scum and Vultures