What books can you just re-read forever?

[MNHubbie]

What are your old faithfuls that you can turn to when you can't be bothered with anything else?

A few of mine are:

Watchmen: Moore and Gibbons
American Psycho: Easton Ellis
Slaughter House V: Vonnegut
Good Omens: Gaiman and Pratchett
1984: Orwell
The Dark Knight Returns: Miller
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better than Life (combined edition): Grant and Naylor
Batman: Year One: Miller et al
The Selfish Gene: Dawkins

There are quite a few more but I do find myself drifting back to these a lot.

Anyone else like anything on the selection?

What are your favourites?

I can't. So many books, so little time - why re-read them?

I never get tired of reading The Remains of the Day

or The Diary of a Nobody

finished slaughterhouse last month actually, and whilst it was aneasy read, and it did make me here and there, i thought it was dull.

1984 - i read that for the very first time last year, and i thought it exellent, but not a re-read

anyway, not a critique of your list,

so heres mine

lord of the ring trilogy
hobbit

collections of poems inc the bbc best voted poems and a collection of humour poetry and the works of dorothy parker, ican read herstuff overandover and it cracks me up

gone with the wind and wuthering heights

Pride and Prejudice
Alice in Wonderland
Lord of the Rings

Only ploughed through Lord of the Rings once and found it a hard journey in the end. Worthwhile but difficult.

Slaughterhouse V I just love returning to because of Vonnegut's incredible style and the balancing of light and dark... So it goes.

My list is split between very dark and very light books to be honest with Slaughterhouse in the middle, 1984 at one end and Red Dwarf at the other. Sometimes I need to return to Bateman's vapid, emotionless life of fashion and murder in American Psycho or to work through the oppressive nature of 1984.

I thought when reading it that Catch 22 would end up being a book to return to but the sheer darkness at the end ripped my heart out and terrified me to be honest. I read a chapter towards the end on the horrors of a war torn city that came after high comedy whilst sitting in the car waiting for a supermarket to open when we were camping. When I walked into the supermarket the range of foods, the consumerism, the crowds pushing and snatching, the waste... it all became too much after reading that chapter and I bloody started crying in the supermarket... so that one may be a while before I go back to it.

As for why return to them? Sometimes to find new things in the text or images that has been missed, sometimes because my head isn't in the right place for a new journey, sometimes to warm up for a run of new reads and sometimes because I just feel like it or need to.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
Billy by Albert French
La Femme de Jean by Madeleine Someone or other
Just finished Call The Midwife by Jennifer Worth today and I LOVED it!
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (young adult)
The Throwback, Tom Sharpe

I'll remember others, so will be back ...

PRide and Prejudice
Georgette Heyer - all of them bar Penhallow
Terry Pratchett - all of the Discworld and Johnny books and especially Good Omens

I read Catch 22 by keeping it by the loo - did finish it but that disjointedness reduced its impact somewhat. Glad I've read it but wouldn't want to go back there.

Books I never want to re-read:
The Kite Runner - too distressing
The Sett - Sir Ranulph Fiennes - I still haven't satisfactorily worked out if it's a novel or a true story. If it's true, it's much worse than if it's a novel.
Anything by E.V. Thompson - sick man
Anything by Karin Slaughter - sick woman

As with films, I get sucked right into the ambience of books and I can't be doing with reading about/seeing the really bleak and black side of humanity on a regular basis - it kills little bits of me and I get very down.

blimey, fair play if you can read American Pyscho over & over

it's not exactly a comfort read is it

Alan Clark's Diaries
Any Nigella cookbook (barely use them for cooking from, but read them all the time as they are written really well)
Writing Home - Alan Bennett
His Dark Materials trilogy - Phillip Pullman
Silas Marner - George Elliot
Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
AA Gill's collection of restaurant and TV reviews

I tend to agree with the 'too many books, too little time' maxim most of the time but have read these more than once and will probably read them again at some point:

Pride & Prejudice
Persuasion
The Stand
French Lieutenant's Woman
Music & Silence
To The Ligthhouse
Rebecca (natch)
A year in Provence/A year in the merde series

Never want to read again because life is far too short:

We need to talk about Kevin
A Prayer for Owen Meany
anything by ERnest Hemingway

Pride & Prejudice
Persuasion
Wuthering Heights

I read a novel a couple of years ago where the protagonist re-reads P&P when upset about things. She describes it as hiding out in Mr Bennett's library.

yy ther's definite comfort to be found in P&P

Agree about Hemingway - had to read one recently and can't for the life of me see why he is rated so highly...

I used to re-read books a lot when I was a child (my dd does this now) but the only ones I re-read now are a few Jane Austen

I think I find his writing a bit too abrupt and spare ifyswim

Little Women/Good Wives, have re-read these a thousand times and cry every time Beth dies

I keep going back to The Road which I am amazed by more and more.

The Kindness of Women and Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard also.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying by Orwell. if only he were standing in tomorrow's election!

All the Laura Ingalls Wilder series; I read these loads of times as a girl and now my dd1 is reading them and really enjoying them so I have been re reading bits of those too. They are just wonderful!

Anyone read The Education of Little Tree by Forest Carter? - Probably my best read of all time!

as a child i read, reread and read again many books.

so many lovely things to discover.

adult books are mainly shit and i am now so excited when i read something enjoyable.

am currently on daphne du m and iris murdoch. satisfying. not much fun though.

By TheFoosa Wed 05-May-10 08:39:07
blimey, fair play if you can read American Pyscho over & over

it's not exactly a comfort read is it

That must be it then...

It is the writing to be honest the balance of the utter emptiness of the normal characters the capitalism gone mad juxtaposed with the murders and then the nagging doubt about whether any of it was real and if perhaps it was just Bateman's way of coping.

On the flip side with the darkness though I could never read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest again, ever. I've only ever seen clips of the film and I don't want to see any more. The feeling of being utterly powerless is so claustrophobic by the end that it made it hard to breath.

Similarly I can never watch "The War Game" the BBC DocuDrama from the 60s ever again. It is badly made, stupidly snobbish in presentation and so forth but once you get into it... it is, for me being mid 30s and having grown up under the fear of nuclear war near military bases, utterly terrifying and just hit me for six for weeks afterwards.

I tend not to re-read fiction.

Although I have re-read Rosemary's Baby (Ira Levin) loads and loads of times. Because all the clues are there but you never seem to see them all in any one reading.

I have read most of Joe Orton's plays several times because I just love them. Ditto Noel Coward.

I dip into and out of non-fiction all the time. I could read any of Bill Bryson's books over and over again. And the Kenneth Williams Diaries. And Harry Thompson's biography of Peter Cook which is a magnificent book imo.

Just realised this is in Adult Fiction but - hey - am going to post anyway!

My comfort re-reads are:

The Tempest
Cold Comfort Farm
Down and out in Paris and London
My Family and Other Animals
Chocky
The House on the Strand (for no particular reason)
Pretty much all of Dorothy Sayers
Middlemarch

That's about it, I think

I reread I Capture the Castle when I feel a bit poorly or glum, and have done since I was a teenager

[slightly pathetic]

...tbh now I don't really have to read it- I know the bugger virtually off by heart

Also I like reading Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker- always find something I previously missed. It seems to become a different book every time