it;'s best the twelfth time - re-reads!

[tyaca]

ok --- what have you read sooooo many times??

Cold Comfort Farm poss tops my list

Though i've been reading antonia forest non-stop for twenty years

my sister swears that kids author, cynthia voight, peaks on a twelfth read ;-)

Ooji - to kletter dishes is a term we use at home !

if feeling like a blast from the past I will read The What Katy did series, although as a child I used to read it and thing WOW at all the rule breaking now as a parent I sometimes find myself tutting and saying "oh that could have been dangerous"

Love re-reading His Dark Materials

Also have re-read several times the books by Helen Forrester past times and life growing up in liverpool. like this one

aldo my all time favourite re-read is
HARRY POTTER

Hey. Think the books that i have re read again and again and again have to be all the HARRY POTTER books and books from an auther called JANET EVANOVICH, dont know if anyone else has heard of her but she is really funny. Her books are about a female bounty hunter and the amount of crap she gets into is hillarious. Would recommend everyone read them cos you will be laughing like hell!!!!!

Tales of the City books

I capture the Castle

Mary Wesley books (any of them)

Pat Barker Regeneration trilogy

Anything by Anne Tyler esp Saint Maybe, The Clock Winder and The Accidental Tourist

Cats Eye Margaret Atwood

Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone books

Reading this has made me want to revisit Little House and Anne of Green Gables books but with a 6 month old who does not like sleep in the house I may not get time!

Not a big re-reader of books - once is usually enough for me. The only two I've read twice are

George Eliot - Middlemarch
Donna Tartt - The Secret History

leakyR - of course, Mary Wesley! Have read them all loads.

And Laura Ingalls Wilder - might have to buy the whole series to reread, thanks for the reminder

Another vote here for Georgette Heyer, especially if I'm feeling peaky. Frederica or Cotillion would probably be at the top of the list but I've read them all at least 5 times (apart from The Spanish Bride - awful).

Wuthering Heights comes off the shelves every three years or so when I'm in need of a great weepie.

Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehman and Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton are both wonderful and my old US edition of the latter one is so luscious I have to take it out and stroke it every now and then...

tyaca
I am so happy you mentioned antonia forest - as far as I'm concerned she's the greatest underrated novelist of the 20th century. Her books are genius, esp the cricket term and end of term. There's so much psychological depth to them, I can't believe she got pushed away as a school story writer
Which one do you like best?
Otherwise like nearly everyone else anything Mitford

This should be re-read at least once a year -

TULLY by Paullina Simmons

Anything by Anne Tyler.

The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. I read it every February or March, six years in a row, when my winter depression hit me really hard and I couldn't wait for spring to come.
And Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen has always been a favourite.

PS Just saw mention of the orchard on fire by shena mackay - a SUPERB book, the happy bits make you weep with joy and the sad bit makes you weep. It's just brilliant

Oh, forgot: All the books by James Herriot. And Hemingway's short stories.

Georgette Heyer, read most of them a zillion times, especially Regency Buck, Venetia, and Grand Sophy. Agree on Spanish Bride though- awful.
Shogun, by James Clavell. I can just pick it up, open a page and start reading. Notes on a Small Island, by Bill Bryson, the same. Not a novel though.
I capture the castle- re-read this after a long break since childhood, and it was great, will read it again some day I'm sure.
And the weird one anything by the Pullein Thompson sisters, especially anything by Diana. I was a horse mad kid and never recovered, and it's just a lost world, the way they lived.
Headlong, by Michael Frayn. Hilarious and learned and just brilliant.
Any human heart, by Wiliam Boyd. Haven't reread it yet cos I'm saving it up.
ANd I will reread the HArry potters now, so I know what happened n the end and see how it all hangs together. The last one was the best, no?

hi mrsshakleton,

before i found MN, i'd never found any AF fans, have since uncovered loads. you're right, most underated author ever. read any old nonesense as a kid, but quickly the blytons and the brazils dropped off, while the forests only get better. it took me a while to get the religeon stuff, nowadays they just come across such a reflection on englishness. did you know she converted from judaism to catholicism?

i love all the school stories, tho' attic a lot less so. also big fan of ready made family. first baby on way and have decided it has to be Esther

there was another poster on the kids books threads who out geeked me on AF and i was so happy to be in touch with someone who was into her more than me (tho' she turned out to be an ex-librarian who knew about every author and every book ever!)

love all the mitford lovin', i think we are quite a self-selecting group given the amound of the same books that keep popping up.

I feel like i've come home

Tales of the City
Jilly Cooper
Tim Cahill's travel
Bill Bryson's travel
Number 1 Ladies' detective agency
Ian Rankin's Rebus novels
Robertson Davies' Cornish trilogy

I reread the Wouldbegoods by E Nesbit and Apple Bough by Noel Streatfield this summer

Am hoping to be able to read Swallows and Amazons with ds.

mrsshackleton -I'm sooo pleased you loved the Orchard on fire too.

Such an under rated book.

I'm so pleased i'm not it's only admirer (sad I know!)

I've probably read the first 20 pages of Capt corelli's Mandarin about 12ish times, I just can't get any further, no matter how hard I try!

Am re-reading etc. The Red Tent, love it.

It's practically falling apart I have read it so much - 'A Severe Mercy'/Sheldon Vanauken, but I don't know of anyone else who has ever read it! (maybe because it falls into the CS Lewis/religious category).

Had forgotten about the Sue Barton books! Also loved the Mallory Towers books around the same time.

Jane Austen - read them all over & over again - favourite fluctuates between Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion, though Northanger Abbey is hilarious.

Love Dickens & read A Christmas Carol every year.

Great affecton for the Anne of Green Gables series & got a chance to see L.M. Montgomery's home in PEI a few years ago.

The Book of Eve - Constance Beresford Howe.

The Harry Potter books .

Too many more to count. Many books are like old friends that I revisit time & time again.

black beauty
the reading group
harry potter
i'm sure there's lots more but can't think at mo!

Vulgar, you've inspired me to dig out more Shena Mackay - it is great when you discover you're not the only fan, books being such a solitary pursuit
And Tyaca, I'm going to look up the old af threads in geeky fashion. Esther would be great. Or Miranda? I always wanted a daughter called Nicola and a son called Lawrie, but dh had other ideas ...
You're right The Attic Term loses it a bit, she did slightly go off rails when she tried to go all seventies and groovy
But she is still a towering genius and I wish there was a way of seeing the last Marlow book she was apparently in the middle of when she died

what a great thread

I capture the castle
cold comfort farm
pride and prejudice

but also, more than all the others put together

the secret garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

(last read in hospital when DS2 born and the first night home, washed down with half a bottle of red wine - absolute bliss)

mrs shakleton,

yes, i used to think miranda, but gone off it. perhaps, unsurprinsgly, Thalia never made any names lists

i hear AF burnt the transcripts of last book (BUT that could be me confusing her with a dif dead author!)

but yes, gutted, not to find out what happened, hear they were all in 6th form.... nicky presumably head of games, miranda head girl

Very similar to a topic on Radio 4 Open Book last week - someone had written in fed up reading sad depressing books and wanted some recommendations for books to lift the spirit. These were the recommendations (taken from Radio 4 website) - interestingly many are listed above:

All novels by Jane Austen:
Sense and Sensibility
Pride and Prejudice
Mansfield Park
Emma
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Publisher: Vintage Classics

Cranford by Mrs Gaskill
Publisher: Oxford World Classics

House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Publisher: Black Swan

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Publisher: Penguin

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Publisher: Picador

Four Letters of Love by Niall Williamson
Publisher: Picador

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

Rebecca

Tess of the D'urbevilles

To Kill a Mocking Bird

The Colour Purple

(interestingly all books i read as a young teenager - obviously all had a big impact on me. I never re-read books that I first read as an adult.)

My Calvin and Hobbes comic books (not quite the same i know - but i love them)

Reading this list has reminded that I must read Cold Comfort Farm. Its something Ive never got round to.