What books do you re-read regularly?

[Snorerephron]

I've got some book vouchers that have been lurking in my wallet since Christmas, and I would like to use them to purchase a few books.

I mainly buy books second hand and pass them on, or get library books, as I have far too many books already. So if I am buying books I want to know they will be ones I am likely to read over and over again

So my question is what are your favourite books to re-read regularly?

(I like classics, literary novels, funny novels, good contemporary fiction)

I'd ideally like to get a few books but really beautiful editions of them -decent hardbacks

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher every summer and The Winter Solstice by the same author every winter. Both are the equivalent of wrapping yourself up in the softest duvet.

Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice often.

a new one I’ve read a few times now is Weyward by Emilia Hart - love the female power in this.

The Seven Sisters series by Lucinda Reilly. Have read through all 8 books at least four times since I bought them. Love them.

Sure it’s the same as watching the same film or listening to the same songs.

Surely knowing the ending ruins it?

No.

In a good book, there's always something new to notice. The way the author develops the plot and characters or the descriptive writing for scene setting. In a crime novel, noticing the way the author drops in the clues.

Persuasion and Gaudy Night are two books I've read many times but I always find something new.

With Agatha Christie, having read her autobiography, seeing how she uses bits of her own experiences in her novels.

With Georgette Heyer, it's the wit and sparkle of the writing.

See, that's a deeply weird attitude to me, unless you only ever read the kind of stripped-down thriller whose sole point is a twisty plot and a surprise ending.

Aren't you ever reading to be plunged into a world, or a particular writer's sensibility, for characters who are familiar enough to feel like old friends? Or for the different charge that the same novel (or poem, or play) can have over time?

I did recently read Andrea Mara's All Her Fault, not my usual kind of book, and I can absolutely see with that, without individuated characters as such and with no particular evocation of a fictional world, and written in basic, efficient prose, you are only reading for the plot. Once you find out who kidnapped the child and why and what happens afterwards, there would be no reason to ever reread it. It's a one-time only book.

But most novels aren't like that.

Something like Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, which is at one level also a tense psychological thriller where you read to find out what happens, also plunges you into a particular setting, a lush English country house haunted by a dead woman, and it's also designed to be reread. The first time you read it you share the initial innocence of the second Mrs de Winter. The second time you've lost your innocence and read it entirely differently.

Those are certainly two favourite rereads of mine! I'm not that interested in the identity of the 'poltergeist' in Gaudy Night, it's more the brilliant evocation of a women's college of that period, Oxford, all of the preoccupations and worries about women, work and marriage, and the love story with ghastly Peter Wimsey.

It depends on the book. It it's a mystery then possibly, but equally it can be fun reading and knowing what is going to happen

If it is a rich work of literature there are always new things to discover. Or things engage with differently at different stages in life.

And some books are just glorious comfort re-reads. Perfect when you just want something relaxing and familiar

I'm currently on a first read through of Agatha Christie having just discovered the joy of her books and I was looking forward to reading them again knowing the ending - now you've inspired me to read her autobiography before the re -reads begin!

now you've inspired me to read her autobiography before the re -reads begin!

Make sure also to read her memoir Come Tell Me How You Live.

I was going to say more, but not sure how much you know about her life, so won't pre-empt your reading.

Not a lot, so thank you!

I re-read Rebecca most years and A Christmas Carol at Christmas.

I re-read These Old Shades by Georgette Heyer recently (thanks for the recommendation, MN) and was surprised at how witty it is.

All Jane Austen. All Josephine Tey. Middlemarch. Rivals (not her other ones) The Shardlake series. The Peter Wimsey series. Antonia Forest.

Talking of books that hit differently at different stages of your life and of biographies... I mentioned the Little House On The Prairie - that's a very different perspective as an adult (The Long Winter is tremendous and horrific). Prairie Fires (Wilder's biography by Caroline Fraser) is a masterpiece, I've read it at least 3 times.

I'm a big re-reader so my list works be very long. I don't even mind that, with some old friends, I know every line of dialogue and there are no surprises left.
If I had to have just one 'Desert Island' book for the rest of my life, it would have to be Middlemarch, because there are so many strands within it. But I would also read & re-read Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies (but, as a pp said, not The Mirror and the Light), Persuasion, Emma & P+P, the Cazalet series, Bleak House, Jane Eyre, A Suitable Boy and all 20 of the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin books.

I love seeing The Little White Horse mentioned here. I adored it as a child then came across it more recently and still found it enchanting.

Great choice. Harold Bloom thought Ford was one of the most underrated novelists of the 20th-century. The TV adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch is pretty good.

Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
P G Wodehouse: Right Ho Jeeves
Oscar Wilde: Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
Iris Murdoch: Under the Net
Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That
Bertrand Russell: Autobiography
Anthony Burgess: Enderby

These are mine:

I Capture the Castle
The Bell Jar
No More Meadows
East of Eden
The Portrait of a Lady
Rebecca
The Wasp Factory
The Sea, The Sea
To The Lighthouse
The Greengage Summer
Gone With The Wind
Wide Sargasso Sea
The Chrysalids
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
The Catcher in the Rye
Sons and Lovers
Alice in Wonderland
A Little Princess
Anne of Green Gables
A Dolls’ House
The Handmaid’s Tale
Little Women
The Shell Seekers
Ballet Shoes
The Picture of Dorian Gray

When my pain is unmanageable even with my strong painkillers I find the repetition of familiar books, programmes and films soothing. A bit like little children who always finish story time with their favourite story. For DD it was two new stories and then a very familiar favourite. It brings stability.

Every year I read
The Fortnight in September by RC Sheriff
The Darling Buds of May and the others in the series, HE Bates
The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber.

Daddy Long Legs - Jean Webster
Dear Lupin - Roger Mortimer

@Dappy777 ooh yes, A Time of Gifts and Between The Woods and the Water, which I probably love even more; there's such a sad end-of-summer beauty to it, knowing this whole Austro-Hungarian kastély way of life is about to be swept away by WW2 and the Iron Curtain coming down....

I would have said the same when I originally read them. Now, particularly having read volumes of his collected letters in which it's pretty clear he was a 'delightful' leech on people with money, I find the persona cloth-eared and carefully crafted, with all that swooping from sleeping in barns with shepherd to hunting parties at the exquisite houses of contessas within 24 hours.

The wind in the willows, it's just gorgeous, I have read it many times and now have a treasured special edition.
For non fiction I return again and again to Joan Didion's Year of Magic Thinking, it's heartbreaking, shocking and thought provoking all at once. I don't know how she actually got through that year .

I read books again because I like the story- and when I read them, I see the story acted out in my mind, as it were. It's like watching a favourite film.

I'm really interested that you chose "The Kitchen God's Wife" z I love Amy Tan but that was my least favourite.

100 Secret Senses is outstanding though.

Sorry to derail @Snorerephron , hope you find some lovely books!