Oh! and the Chronicles of Narnia.
I’m surprised anyone would admit to reading Atlas Shrugged more then once around here. I’ve read it twice though, and I’ve read The Fountainhead a few times as well. Also from your list I’ve read Frankenstein a couple of times.
Usually I tend not to read books more then once. I can only remember a few really, though I’ve thought about doing it I’ve always found other things to read instead. I only get an hour or so a day during the week while on the train to read so I have to find things I want to read.
I dont reread nearly as often as I used to (primarily because I don’t read as much) but my favorites are:
Sherlock Holmes
Nero Wolfe
Robert Heinlein (mostly the earlier stuff)
Terry Pratchett
Old school Stephen King
Dean Koontz (yeah, he’s cheese but it’s so soothing)
Lord of the Rings
There are probably others but that’s all I can think of right now.
For a long time my passion was short fiction I have favorites by Heminway, Carson McCullers, Rick Bass, and Tobias Wolf that get reread frequently.
As for novels, A Confederacy of Dunces, Still Life With Woodpecker, Geek Love and a charming book that just makes me smile called Chicken Every Sunday are each revisited not yearly but easily every couple of years.
About 2 years ago I decided that I really ought to read some Jane Austen and have not read all of them yet but have reread Pride and Prejudice and Emma since taking them up originally and see myself rereading more of them going forward.
Besides JRRT and Pratchett, I regularly re-read “The House of God” by Samuel Shem, and “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!: Daily Affirmations By Stuart Smalley”.
That’s about it these days, though. I used to be a voracious re-reader, but now I mostly prefer new stuff.
The Lord of The Rings and The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The first four Dune books, by Frank Herbert
The Stand and The Dark Tower series, by Stephen King
The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. Time traveling, a feisty, strong heroine, and a big old red-headed honest-to-Goodness Scottish Highlander who looks fantastic in a kilt. Rowr.
I also just finished the **Masters of Rome ** series by Colleen McCullough…I had to get ready for Antony and Cleopatra, which she said she wasn’t going to write, but I’m glad she did.
The weird thing with me is that there are some authors like David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Tom Clancy, S.M. Stirling, and John Varley that I can read over and over again. But there are other authors, who I enjoy greatly, whose books I will only read once and never reread.
The Milagro Beanfield War, one of the funniest books ever written.
For me, it divides up into two categories - one is books that I’m re-reading just for the frothy, escapist pleasure. Into this category, place Guy Gavriel Kay, early Steven King, C. S. Forster, Kenneth Oppel, Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick O’Brian, blah, blah, I think you see the pattern emerging.
The other category is the books that I don’t expect to get fully on the first try - Herodotus, Homer, Tolstoy, Dostoyevskii, Cervantes, Pynchon, Joyce, or non-fiction - the Penguin History of the World is something I’ve read a couple of times and come back to. Sometimes it’s that the books in this category are too complex for me to absorb everything in one go, and sometimes it’s just that I find things that never caught my eye the last time.
Rackensack - I’m curious; how did you come across the Bulgakov? I had a Russian teacher that thought it was one of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century, but everyone I’ve mentioned it to has never heard of it. I haven’t tackled my copy of it yet, (it’s in Russian, for one thing, and I think it will take me months with a dictionary to get through it), but one of these days… Do you have a favourite translation? M de l’A.
I’ve been reading **Alice In Wonderland ** and **Alice Through The Looking Glass ** once or t wice a year for more than 50 years.
And I’ve read most of H. P. Lovecraft dozens of times.
My top ten:
Busman’s Honeymoon by Dorothy Sayers (currently rereading for approximately 250th time)
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein (currently rereading for approximately 40th time)
Into Thin Air by John Krakauer (once read six times in a row in less than a week)
Into the Wild by John Krakauer (often read after finally having enough of Into Thin Air)
All the President’s Men by Woodward and Bernstein
The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein (to find out how All the President’s Men ends)
Drinking: A Love Story by Carolyn Knapp (for melancholy moods)
dot-bomb by David Kuo
Den of Thieves by James Stewart (read twice a year when visiting my parents, plus I now have my own copy for when I haven’t finished the whole thing at my parents’.)
Levine & Co. (more of the Den of Thieves story)
I don’t reread anything as often as once a year, but I’ve been re-reading all of the Harry Potters before each new book and film.
Other persistent rereads:
The Left Hand of Darkness–Le Guin
Orphans of the Sky–Heinlein
Darwinia–Wilson
China Trace–Wright
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down–Fadiman
Read more than once on purpose:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkein
The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
The People of the Black Circle - Robert E. Howard
**The World According to Garp ** - John Irving
**The Books of Amber ** - Roger Zelazny
By accident:
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Corey Doctorow
Books I’ve started more than once but never finished:
The Phenomenon of Man - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas R. Hofstadter
I’ve read Huckleberry Finn a few times. It’s a great boy’s book that grows up with you.
Like many Dopers, LOTR and almost any Discworld books get frequent re-readings.
Little, Big by John Crowley gets read about every other year. One of the few books I get entirely lost in. I always weep at the end.
I love the first six books of the Amelia Peabody series and frequently pull them out for fun reading. The later ones, not so much. I love archeology, and the charater dynamics of the early books are a great deal more fun than the later ones, with the kids grown up and angsty.
Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are the two Jane Austen I can re-read endlessly.
As far as non-fiction, I love going back and reading all the essay collections of Stephen Jay Gould, as well as a couple non-collections.
I read my copy of “Life is a Banquet”, and autobiography of Rosalind Russell until it dissolved a few years ago. need to replace it.
Yes! Davidson’s stuff is so dense (in a good way) that it repays repeated readings. The same for R A Lafferty–Fourth Mansions may be my favorite novel. And Cordwainer Smith’s works have been collected into two anthologies for easy re-reading; one has all his short stories & the other is Norstrilia–his only SF novel.
Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite funny. But has its depths.
S M Stirling’s Peshawar Lancers is a ripping yarn. For the “real stuff”–there’s Kipling’s Kim. Not to mention The Game–part of Laurie King’s Mary Russell series; every book in the series is “a keeper.” Mark Frost’s The List of Seven is chilling horror–featuring a young doctor caught up in weird adventures with a mysterious character who inspires his literary career. Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series is another pastiche; more books that I won’t discard.
In a similar “vein”–I re-read Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October every Halloween.
Perhaps it’s time to revisit Middle Earth. And the Kingdom of Letters!
How? Odd serendipity. Just before my senior year of high school, I moved from a moderate-sized university town to a tiny (pop ~2000) town in rural eastern Arkansas. I was scanning the local library shelves for something, anything, I hadn’t already read, and came across a copy of the Michael Glenny translation – how that ended up there I’ll never know – it had only ever been checked out once before (back when the books had cards in them, you could actually see who else had checked things out and when). It was in a library-style mylar cover with the original dust jacket, and the picture of the cat with an automatic pistol, together with the jacket copy touting a book that featured Satan, a cat the size of a pig who’s a crack shot with a Browning .45, and naked female vampires, convinced me I needed to read it. Been one of my favorite novels ever since.
As it turned out, the one prior reader was a guy a couple of years older than me, who attended the same college I did and was a good friend of my (randomly assigned) freshman year roommate.
As for the translations, as I said I started with the Glenny translation, and I’d read it several times before trying any of the others. For years, it was out of print (it’s available again as part of the Everyman’s Library series) and the only translation available was the Mirra Ginsburg translation that Grove Press put out, which followed the text as published in the Soviet Union (thus omitting a considerable amount of material). I also found the language less congenial to me, though I have no basis for any opinion as to which hews closer to the feel of the original. I have a copy of the Burgin/O’Connor translation and have read it once; it seemed about on par with Glenny translation in terms of readability, and some of the differences probably have as much to do with changes in American English idiom in the 25 years between Glenny’s work in the mid-60s and Burgin & O’Connor’s in the 1990s. Those who have a better foundation in these things tell me that Burgin and O’Connor are more meticulous about conveying shades of meaning or nuances that Glenny missed. The Burgin/O’Connor edition also has the advantage of an excellent set of notes by Elendea Proffer, one of the leading Bulgakov scholars around. Taken altogether, if I were shopping today for a copy to give someone, I think I’d probably go for the Burgin/O’Connor. I haven’t read the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation, but the text is available online at: http://www.lib.ru/BULGAKOW/master97_engl.txt . There have apparently been two more translations done, one in 2006 by Michael Karpelson, and one forthcoming by Hugh Aplin. Have no opinion of either, obviously.
“The Seven Mysteries of Life”. Guy Murchie. (non-fiction.) It took him eleven years to write, and it is just fascinating.