Books you wish you could read for the 1st time again

[BusyTraybake]

I am currently in bed recovering from surgery. I can expect to be immobile for 6 weeks and I am already bored out of my mind. I actually had a little cry earlier as I am so claustrophobic already.

I have found reading helps. Please recommend any books you wish you could read again for the first time.

Thanks in advance. In desperate in need of mental stimulation as I have turned to food which is not something I usually obsess over. Probably would be best for my overall recovery if I don’t pile on a pad of weight.

My answer to the question: never let me go, love in a time of cholera and persuasion

Sophie world

Rebecca
Revolutionary Road
American dirt - couldn't put it down

Enid Blyton

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. Short but utterly gripping. Read nothing about it and be prepared to not be able to put it down. I sat down to read a chapter and read the whole thing!

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng. Such beautiful language.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. A old classic but surprisingly unsettling.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I heard the first page read on the radio and immediately had to buy it.

Wild, Cheryl Strayed. A very thought provoking book, determination, grief, anger, deep sadness, brave, solitude

Of those already mentioned I love the LOTR and His Dark Materials series, A Town Like Alice and I Capture the Castle.

In addition:

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
Helen Zenna Smith, Not So Quiet
L M Alcott, Little Women
H. D. Bid Me to Live
E M Forster, Howards End
Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
P D James, Devices and Desires
plus Edgar Allan Poe's spooky stories

Get well soon, OP!

Little Man, what now? by Hans Fallada

Remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro (very different from Never Let me go, but also beautiful)

Fiesta by Ernest Hemmingway

Eva Luna by Isabelle Allende (Paula is actually my favourite by Isabelle Allende- an utterly beautiful, astounding, heartbreaking book - but I read it before I was a mother, and I'm not sure I could read it now)

The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak
The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy
Street Without a Name, Kapka Kassabova
The Casual Vacancy, JK Rowling
Wolf Hall etc, Hilary Mantel
Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut

I’m struggling to get through this and finding it hard to keep the characters straight.

My Sisters Keeper - Jodi Picoult

The Lord of the Rings
Tigana, A Song for Arbonne really anything by Guy Gavriel Kay
Thomas Covenant Chronicles - Stephen Donaldson
Pern Series by Anne McCaffrey - but not the books her son wrote

I strongly recommend checking out The End of the World Reading Club! They send you a box with a dystopian novel in it and loads of gifts. You open each gift when you get to the page number on the gift and it's something that brings the story to life. So it might be that the people in the story are eating lemon sherberts and you get a pack of those, or they're listening to a song and you get a link to a Spotify sound track. Honestly they're fantastic. You can get a one off box where you know what the book is, or you can trust them to choose it for you.

Following with interest ! Happy to see many of mine here….and many to follow up on.
I would add Sophie’s Choice as there is no way to replicate the shock of the denouement of the title a second time…and I read it before the film came out. Many à time I overshot my tube stop with my nose buried in it !
(This is not Sophie World btw which I have read too but bit vague about it)
Hope you have much inspiration OP ! 💐

Gods in Alabama. I don’t know why but it always sticks with me.

I loved her Pern when I was a teenager. Are the ones by her son rubbish?

Another vote for Discworld, the Slow Horses series, LOTR, Captain Corelli’s mandolin, Thursday Murder Club books, Georgette Heyer. In addition I don’t think anyone has mentioned the Millennium Trilogy(girl with the dragon tattoo etc) I also like a vicar/detective series by Rev Richard Coles. My late DP was a big fan of the Charlie Parker books by John Connolly. Not my thing (combination of PI and supernatural) but I used to pre-order them for him whenever there was a new one and he devoured them. (He always complained that they didn’t come fast enough and he would die before the story ended which proved to be the case sadly)

Guy Gavriel Kay - the Lions of Al Rassan, A song for Arbonne, and the 2 books of The Sarantine Mosaic

The Poisonwood Bible
I Capture the Castle
Jane Eyre
The Historian

My favourite for this sort of circumstance is Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy, followed by the Levant Trilogy if time allows. The story of Harriet and Guy has seen me through many illnesses and crises and I can't really imagine life without them - I'm on my second copy of the book, my first copy just fell apart.
Six weeks might not be long enough, but I would love to to sit down and read the whole of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time again. I read it a long time ago while I was working and had young children, and it took me a year to get through it. I'd like to start again with more time and a greater ability to lose myself in the story and the characters.

The lady vanishes by Ethel Lina White , you can't read it twice !

If you need something which doesn’t require huge levels of concentration but is absorbing, I’d recommend the Cormoran Strike series by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling), or any of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels.

I would also second the recommendation for Maggie O’Farrell, my favourites so far are Hamnet, The Marriage Portrait and Instructions for a Heatwave, but I’ve never found one I didn’t enjoy.

Stoner by John Edward Williams

Even if it didn’t think it’s was an ethically dubious piece of misery porn, I’d hesitate to recommend it to someone who is feeling bored and sad because they’re immobilised and recovering from surgery!

OP, I think I’d be very careful about what I immersed myself in if my mood was (understandably) low, and pay attention to what I liked.

What I wish I could read for the first time but think are fairly ‘safe’, while brilliant, are (as everyone else said) all of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories, Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte, Kate O”Brien’s Mary Lavelle and As Music and Splendour, Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, Chekhov’s short stories, all of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows trilogy, Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds, Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.

If you like magic realism, have you read Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits?

Best wishes for your recovery.

Henry — rude, pale, wears tiny glasses, is brilliant at Greek
Bunny — rude, honking boor, leeches off everyone,
Francis — hypochondriac rich boy with a country house
Charles — blonde boy twin, slightly less rude
Camilla — blonde girl twin, compellingly beautiful
Richard — suburban Californian pretending not to be, in love with the rest of them, cosplaying as old money via a few purchases in the thrift shop.

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon

Wish you better!