What is your favorite book to read again, and again, and again...

I started reading Ender’s Game last night after I finished The Bad Guys Won about the '86 NY Mets. When my wife saw what I was reading, she asked just how many times I had read it…

So that got me thinking about all my favorite books I read over and over again.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Have a Nice Day! by Mick Foley
The Runaway Jury by John Grishom

The first one is pretty popular, but the other two are a bit off the wall. I love Mick Foley’s writing, and have read everything he has written so far. Same goes for Grishom (for better or worse). Runaway Jury was a great tale, and a supposedly interesting movie.

So what are yours?

I like re-reading anything by Feist, Battle at Sethanon has some truly awesome material, as does the rest of that series. My favorite character, Nakor, doesn’t come until later, but I love the original series the best. I need to re-buy the books as well, they’ve been read so many times that they are falling apart.

I plan on re-reading the Fire and Ice books soon, timing it so that I finish when the next one comes out. But usually I only read books once.

I used to read NightBlood over and over. It’s a great little action/vamp book for when I was in the mood for an easy read.

Wheel of Time I used to start from book 1 everytime a new book was coming. Now bleh. But I must have read the first book about 20 times over the years.

Dune and Shogun

The Shining and The Stand

Sword of Truth But lately that’s going the Wheel of Time Route.

Oath of Swords another really good ‘easy’ read

Briar King frankly I can’t figure out why I don’t see it mentioned more often. It looks like the start of a great series.

damn now i feel like a dork. There’s not a book on that list I’ve read less then 10 times.

I almost never read a fiction book more than once except A Prayer for Owen Meany . I’ve read it five times and cried at the end every time.

Same author, SP2263.
A Widow for One Year

IT by Stephen King
The Amber series by Roger Zelazny

anything by Terry Pratchett

As I’ve said in another thread, I read The Devil’s Day a lot. Same for Breakfast of Champions and Player Piano. I’ll also re-read Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter trilogy on occaison.

Books I’ve read all the way through once and like to thumb through:

The Real Frank Zappa Book
Skipping Towards Gomorrah
Portnoy’s Complaint
Deathbird Stories
Fear of Flying

Anything by Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s paperbacks especially tend to wear out.

Anything by Terry Pratchett and/or Neal Gaiman.

I also like to flip through my superhero novels (The Last Days of Superman, Knightfall) and just read the fight scenes.

Currently re-reading Lord of the Rings. Again. I wore out my paperbacks a while back and was given a hardback volume last year as a gift. It’s just what I needed.

Feist’s Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon.
Card’s Ender’s Game
Clavell’s King Rat - leaps and bounds better than Shogun, which is pretty good in its own right
Glen Cook’s The Black Company
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and The Sirens of Titan. I love Mother Night above all others but it’s too emotionally loaded to re-read 2-3 times a year.

Mostly, I just re-read textbooks to fall asleep. There’s too many other books out there I haven’t read yet to spend wide-awake time re-reading. That said, if I can’t get any new books and want something to read right away, anything by Terry Pratchet, Jane Austen, or Joel Achenbach will keep me occupied–even if I’ve read it several times before.

SP2263, I read A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time only a few months ago. What an incredible read!

My favorite to reread is Trinity by Leon Uris.

The two novels have in common the thread of the coming of age of two boyhood friends.

The Lucia books by EF Benson.

They are funny and cheering in a 1920s English village way. Benson’s gorgeous prose is rather dense and as I have a bad habit of reading too fast, reading the books every couple of years is like coming to a fresh new book; I find new things all the time.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.

Another perennial, again one I grab for comfort and charm. I nearly know the story off by heart, so that if the world burns and there are no books left, I can be the teller of this story and will have some use at last. Providing, of course, that I am left, too.

Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion all get read pretty frequently, bless Miss Austen. Gaudy Night, my favourite of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsey novels comes out at least once a year so I can have a good sniffle over it. I guess I’m just a sucker for romance.

Yeah, those are all worth a couple of re-reads, aren’t they? :: happy sigh ::

I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn about once a year.
I’ve read The Stand about a dozen times or more.

Over the summer for pool-time reading, I grab a paperback of either Sue Grafton or Janet Evanovich. Quick, easy and fun reads.

[QUOTE=Idlewild]
Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Persuasion all get read pretty frequently, bless Miss Austen.

Jane Austen is my favourite too for ‘comfort reading’ - along with ‘To kill a Mockingbird’ and Shogun.

When I want to cheer myself up I re-read one of Bill Bryson’s books - still the only books which make me laugh out loud, even when I’m feeling really down.

The Harry Potter books. I must have read each one about 10 times, but I still get nervous at the end, and I still giggle at the sarcastic quotes in the books. Here is one of my favorties:
Uncle Vernon: You’re watching the news? Again?
Harry: Well it changes everyday you see.

Ahahahahahahaha

She Who Remembers

Voice of the Eagle

Let the Drums Speak

All by Linda Lay Schuler

** Mother Earth, Father Sky**

** My sister the Moon **

** Brother Wind**

All by Sue Harrison
Chldren of the Ice

By Charlene Printess
The Oddessey

By Greek author Homer
There were many others, buy the above listed were by far my favorites :slight_smile:

I’ve read a ton of books more that once - lots of sci-fi and fantasy when I was a kid - but the ones that make the cut now:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Dune
The Chosen

I have read Pride & Prejudice several times, but after we got the DVD of the BBC mini-series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth - my wife’s favorite movie of all time - we have watched it, or just parts of it, dozens of times…

Dune - A good thinking read.
Lord of the Rings - Ditto
Dracula - Because who could pass up an adventure written by a sick bastard (victorian version).