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

Reaper Man and Thief of Time by Pratchett.
Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy.
Any Douglas Adams.

I’m sure there’s more, but my bookshelf is at home.

Illuminatus! Trilogy-Robert Anton Wilson

Schroedinger’s Cat Trilogy-Robert Anton Wilson

**Bird By Bird ** - Anne Lamot

Red Storm Rising by Clancy (or anything else of his)
Exodus by Leon Uris (worn out 2 copies of this 'un)
any Douglas Adams
currently rereading the entire Harry Potter series

Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert Heinlein

also Citizen of the Galaxy

I know they’re ‘juveniles’, but they are so darned good.

“Your world will be rotated”
“I would protect you with my body, as you did me.”
“You were a mess! I saw! I still have nightmares!”
“We will make our own sun”

I also reread the end of Footfall by Niven and Pournelle:

“Accelerating… find a target.”
WHAM!
WHAM!
WHAM!

Satch

Not particularly in this order…

Stephen King’s THE STAND,
Bram Stoker’s DRACULA,
Ayn Rand’s ATLAS SHRUGGED,
C.S. Lewis’s THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH

occasionally, there will be others (such as Owen Meany, Narnia, Frankenstein) but those four are nigh perrenial (sp?) for me.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman Jeffrey Robins, Ed., Richard P. Feynman, Intro. by Freeman Dyson. I especially like “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and “Los Alamos from Below”.

This is something I pretty much keep on my nightstand year-round, and skip about in as I drift off to sleep. Hopefully a smidgen of Feynman’s wit and intuitive brilliance will seep in and lodge somewhere while I’m in dreamland.

I’m on board with The Stand (at least a dozen times), King Rat (also a Great Movie), and To Kill A Mockingbird (another Great Movie). I have re-read many King books, especially The Dead Zone, and many Clavell books, including Shogun, Noble House and Tai-Pan.

I re-read a couple of the early Dirk Pitt books - Raise the Titanic! and Vixen '03 - a bunch of times. Clive Cussler was an entertaining author, but he overplayed his hand and ceased to entertain me after his first 6 books or so.
Another book I can’t seem to put down for more than 6 months at a time is Watership Down, which gets better every time I read it.

Also, I must have read Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins a dozen times; it’s still my favorite book of his.

There are many many more; I spent at least one hour a day reading novels from the time I was 10 to about age 35, and I read fast (about 60 pages an hour), so that’s at least 500k pages, and I almost always re-read the ones I like. I guess there’s about 300 books I’ve re-rad, and about 100 I’ve re-read more than once.

When I’m tired, I’ll pick up one of L. E. Modessitt’s Recluce novels, and mostly read the bits about food and woodworking. I’ve probably memorised some of the Little House books.

I reread almost everything. It’s hard to pick.

The ones I’ve probably read the most often are Deerskin and Spindle’s End- Robin McKinley, LOTR, Outlaw Cook- John Thorne, Two-Part Invention- Madeleine L’Engle, and the Anne series.

Slaughterhouse Five is one I reread every year. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one I’ll hafta reread soon. Echoes of the Great Song by David Gemmell is a book that wows me over and over and over. Night Watch by Pratchett is one I need to reread soon and I can’t wait.

Most of my favorite rereadable books are series:

All the Discworld books
The original Sherlock Holmes stories
Nero Wolfe books
Lord of the Rings
Ender’s Game (but not the sequels)
Occasionally reread Heinlein
Anne MacAffrey’s Dragon books (particulalry the early ones)
Stephen King (early works only)
Dean Koontz (earlier books only)

Most of my favorite rereads tend to be adventure stories that are not difficult reads with strong main characters I’m fond of.

I used to reread a lot of Stephen King’s books – The Stand in particular – but I haven’t been motivated to do that for quite a while. Maybe 10 years…

But I do reread Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth at least once a year. Not only is it my co-favorite book, it’s short!

I also re-read everything. If I had answered this as a teenager, the answer would have been Gone With the Wind. I could actually recite long stretches of it. Now, I re-read lots of my King novels. Probably the book I have re-read the most often in the last ten years would be Jane Eyre. Watership Down would be next.

I was going to say the same thing about both of those authors. I heard about Terry Pratchett on these boards, and I’ve read almost all of them now. Some of them several times.

I’ve read *Stanger in a Strange Land * by Heinlein more times than I can remember (I keep giving away my copy too darnnit!).

About every year since I was 12, I have read Wuthering Heights. I don’t know why!! Somebody really has to stop me, it’s so beautiful and dark and depressing. I can’t resist. And no matter how many times I read it, Catherine never comes back. But I don’t stop hoping :slight_smile:

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins, I love this book, but I can’t for the life of me tell you why.

Also, any Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker I can get my hands on will be devoured.

I’ve re-read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings every Christmas for about 6 years.

3 books I take everywhere with me are
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

My tastes are a little bit eclectic.

9o% of my reading is science fiction, but whenever I have a gap in my reading schedule the one book I can read and read is Catch 22. It’s like an old friend, I first read it in the 60s and still have the same copy.

I’ve re-read the Jeeves and Wooster stories several times, and Wodehouse’s golf stories.

There were books I re-read a lot as a kid, like Catcher in the Rye, but I tend not to re-read as much now as I used to, since there’s so much new reading I am trying to catch up on. Wodehouse is the exception. The familiarity is part of the coziness of reading his stories at this point.

I tend to revisit Jane Austen quite a bit, especially Pride and Prejudice.

Other favourites:

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Muskateers (Alexandre Dumas)

I just reread Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and laughed as much as I did the first time around. I love that guy.

Also like to reread Dorothy L. Sayers (Idlewild, may I say you have impeccable taste?)

Otherwise, I try to keep rereading to a minimum. I’m trying to read more of my piles of unread books at home. I’m such an optimist. :smiley:

This is what I was going to say. Well, not the part about the 60s, since I wasn’t around then, but Catch-22, definitely.

I’ll also pick up The Milagro Beanfield War, by John Nichols, anytime I don’t have anything to do. I’ve never really gotten into the other books in this series, but I think this one is amazing.

Harry Crews wrote an autobiographical… essay? Longer than that, but shorter than a full book called Childhood: The Biography of a Place that I love to read over and over again. It’s in a book with an essay called Fathers, Sons and Blood that I’ve never been able to read without crying.

The Stand by Stephen King

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

The Firm by John Grisham. I don’t know what it is about this book–I think I enjoy reading the very detailed descriptions of the inner workings of a law office. I don’t even like John Grisham all that much.

And I know these aren’t novels but I do reread them a good bit: Gallery of Regretable Foods by James Lieks and all of my Calvin and Hobbes collections. :smiley: