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Novels worth reading more than twice.

90 replies

AudiobookListener · 13/07/2024 16:55

I'm currently rereading a book from my childhood "Little Katia" by E M Almedingen which I've read perhaps 20 times. I love the feeling of rereading but I've only read a very few novels more than twice. I've properly read Jane Eyre 9 times and Day of the Trifids about 5. Some Jane Austen I've read 3 times, as well as all the Sherlock Holmes stories and Robinson Crusoe. These are all books I first read as a child. Now I'm looking to expand my repertoire.

Which novels are worthy of multiple rereads?

OP posts:
Thesnoozingsighthound · 13/07/2024 17:18

I don’t reread multiple times with many books, but these three I reread every couple of years:
Little Women
Pride and Prejudice
I Capture the Castle
As with you, these are all classic comforting books from childhood. I may reread a book from recent years again, but I’m much less likely to do so multiple times.

FizzingAda · 13/07/2024 17:42

House on the Strand by du Maurier
Lord of the Rings
The Unlikely Ones by Mary Brown
Wutherineg a heights and Jane Eyre
Norah Lofts House trilogy, plus lots of her other books
Dracula
Manda Scott's four Boudicca books
all of Maeve Binchy (like putting on comfy slippers)

BiggerBoat1 · 13/07/2024 17:47

I agree with I Capture The Castle. I could read Skellig over and over.
I’ve read the entire Tales of the City series twice and would read it again.
I’ve only read The Mariage Portrait once, but already want to read it again.

OlgaBracley · 13/07/2024 19:19

All the Mapp and Lucia novels by E.F. Benson
Diary of a Nobody by Grossmith
All the Jane Austen novels
All the Bronte novels
Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
All the Miss Marple and Poirot novels by Agatha Christie

EineReiseDurchDieZeit · 13/07/2024 19:20

Middlemarch

Bigoldmachine · 13/07/2024 19:25

We have always lived in the castle (my favourite book ever)
i am legend
the grapes of wrath
to kill a mockingbird

WolfFoxHare · 13/07/2024 19:30

Watership Down
Anything by Edith Pargeter
Anything by Mary Renault
The Aubrey-Maturin series
Antonia Forest
The Crystal Cave trilogy
Some of Margaret Atwood
Austen

All brilliant and worth re-reading for the quality of the writing.

Then comfort re-reads like Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, CS Lewis, Tolkien, Robin Hobb.

ViscountessMelbourne · 13/07/2024 19:35

There's a distinction between books you reread for comfort, like Georgette Heyer, Terry Pratchett or Harry Potter, and books you reread because there's more to get out of them like Jane Austen or Moby Dick.

I'd put Les Liaisons Dangereuses, A Song Of Ice and Fire, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Left Hand of Darkness into the latter category.

Ballet Shoes is somewhere in between, because it's a total comfort read but my perspective on it changes every time. Ditto Dracula I think.

user1471453601 · 13/07/2024 19:37

A Prayer for Owen Meany.

And

the Stand - the long version.

llamajohn · 13/07/2024 19:39

Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men

MissScarletInTheBallroom · 13/07/2024 19:43

A Thousand Splendid Suns.

Bollockybollocky · 13/07/2024 19:45

Lots of those already mentioned but also lots of Wodehouse.

WolfFoxHare · 13/07/2024 19:47

Oh yes, Heyer and Wodehouse. An excellent Heyer/Austen/Eyre-esque writer I have enjoyed re-reading is Jude Morgan (some of his are lighter, Heyer-types, some weightier).

Prometheus · 13/07/2024 19:49

Vanity Fair
Forstye Saga
Historical biographies (Antonia Fraser etc)

Blackcats7 · 13/07/2024 19:49

I like to re read for comfort so lots of books but The Cazalet Chonicles are a particularly great read however many times later.

Illegally18 · 13/07/2024 19:52

11.22.63 by Stephen king I urge you to read for a really great story

Compash · 13/07/2024 20:00

Austen, Cold Comfort Farm, but my all-time comfort read is Vanity Fair, I re-read it every couple of years... If I have to go to hospital or on a scary trip, that's what I take to ground myself. Much as Flora Poste takes the Abbe de Fausse-Maigre's Pensees, in fact...

Poppybetty · 13/07/2024 20:04

I've read The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy countless times. It gets to the heart of what it's like to be a teenage girl but later you read it for the family dynamics.

And I've read A Month in the Country lots of times because it's so beautiful and because I always feel like it might end differently.

Applepencilplant · 13/07/2024 20:08

Vanity Fair
Pride and Prejudice
Wolf Hall
House on the Strand
Jane Casey Maeve Kerrigan books

LolaCrapola · 13/07/2024 20:21

The Color Purple - I had to read for A level English and loved it. Read it a couple of times since.

Captain Correlis Mandolin - I get something new from it each time.
I have recently re-read The Handmaids Tale as I wanted to read the follow up - I originally read it in the 1990s.
The Elizabeth Stroud books about the main protagonist Lucy I read twice - they were so good first time round I wanted to read them again to savour them next time round.

Cooper77 · 13/07/2024 22:52

Some books I re-read for the sheer beauty of the language:

Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
P. G. Wodehouse: Right Ho Jeeves
Anita Brookner: Hotel Du Lac
Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
The poetry of Larkin and T. S. Eliot

Some I re-read for comfort

Sherlock Holmes
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
The Narnia books
The Wind in the Willows
Kipling: Just So Stories

Some I re-read for the author's company. There are certain writers whose personality comes through so strongly that each time I pick them up I feel like the author is there in the room:

Patrick Fermor: A Time of Gifts
Robert Graves: Goodbye to all That
Dickens: David Copperfield
Bertrand Russell: Autobiography
Douglas Adams: Hitchhiker's Guide and also his non-fiction

Some I re-read for intellectual stimulation/sense of wonder

Carl Sagan: Cosmos
Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (and his essays)
Harold Bloom: The Western Canon
Bill Bryson: Short History of Nearly Everything

There are lots of novels I've read once but plan to re-read. I certainly want to re-read Middlemarch, and also Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. In fact, with novels like that I don't think you have read them until you've re-read them.

Nothingeverything · 14/07/2024 20:31

I have a terrible memory so I could probably read lots of books several times without realising. I have reread War and Peace and Anna Karenina and there was so much I'd forgotten.

UtterlyUnimaginativeUsername · 14/07/2024 20:39

Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede. Every older version of me finds something new in it.

Illegally18 · 14/07/2024 23:43

UtterlyUnimaginativeUsername · 14/07/2024 20:39

Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede. Every older version of me finds something new in it.

yes, that was a good book

Regalia · 15/07/2024 00:20

In no order — Villette (C Bronte), The Fountain Overflows trilogy (West) The Real Charlotte (Somerville and Ross), Le rouge et le noir (Stendhal), All My Puny Sorrows (M Toews), Ulysses (Joyce), all of Antonia Forest, Gaudy Night and Murder Must Adveryise (Sayers),The Last September (E Bowen), The Golden Bowl (H James), The Gathering (Enright), Seven Gothic Tales (Isak Dinesen), Family Sayings, Natalia Ginzburg,The Gate (Szabo) Tales of Bective Bridge (M Lavin), The Age of Innocence (Wharton), L’amant (Duras), Juliet Barker’s Bronte group biography, Wolf Hall trilogy (Mantel), Woolf’s journals and Mrs Dalloway, The Flower of May ( K O’Brien), Conversations with Friends (S Rooney), A Month in the Country (Carr).

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