What books do you read and read again?

he's fantastic, i first heard the american reader jim dale read the first one, it was okay, dale is a good reader, but when i heard fry, it was like, okay, this is how it should sound

yahoo! i used to hate HP but one Saturday i was desperate for a book (i'm a bookworm) and HP 2 was the only book i could find that i didn't read a million times so i read it. i didn't like that one so much 'cause i didn't read it willingly, but after i read a few of them (i have all of them exept 1 and 3, 7 i found after i got it from the library) i started liking thm and got 1, 3, and 7 from the library. if i knew he was a wizaed i woujld have read them a long time ago. i think it's really not fair that once i get into them, my friends and family get out, so basicly, every time i bring up the subject everyone looks at me weirdly and changes it. even my best friend goes nuts when i talk about it.it gives the strangest feeling because all my friends let me taslk about books they never read but we can't have a proper discussion about something we all read. very annoying, a perfectly normal 11 year old, can't even talk about what she reads.

Harry Potter Series
Define Normal by Julie Ann Peters
Rimwalkers by Vicki Grove
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Crispin by Avi
House of Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

There are quite a few books I reread when I am in a dry period, meaning trying to spend less on books, and there are a few that I turn to regularly and read on an annual basis. Some tend toward the highbrow end, some are just brain candy, but most settle somewhere around the middle:

The last three books of the Harry Potter series
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
the Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Rituals by Cees Nooteboom (trans. by Adrienne Dixon)
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (trans. by Richard and Clara Winston)
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner
The Dialectics of Seeing by Susan Buck-Morss (about Walter Benjamin whose essays I reread often too.)
The Geography of the Imagination by Guy Davenport
A few different Penelope Fitzgerald books, particularly her group biography: The Knox Brothers (Just thinking about this one is making me want to go pick it up right now for some reason.)
Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
The Nicholson Baker oeuvre in general
The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (my current copy is trans. by Constance Garnett, but I had another whose translation I preferred. I can't remember who did it or why on earth I got rid of it.)
The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom (which I loathe, but I keep rereading it to refresh my dislike.)

There are probably a couple of others that I've forgotten, and I've missed them during my scan of the bookshelves. Also, a few years ago, I made a project of rereading all of the old paperbacks that I still had from when I was a kid/teenager. I've been hauling them around for years and I decided to get some use out of them, see if any of them held up. Most didn't and weren't actually finished, but I enjoyed a few of them so much that I've reread them several times since the beginning of the project.

The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper
The Ender series by Orson Scott Card
My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (which I would recommend to any parent for their children.)

Tao Te Ching, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, George R. R. Martins a song of ice and fire series. Really anything with layered philosophical implications or recyclable entertainment value.

You do seem to have picked great books to re-read. I also have some favorite books that I re-read once so often, but it depends on my mood. If I feel bored I usually pick Agatha Christie novels, my favorite is Murder in the Orient Express. If I'm in an artistic/spiritual mood, I re-read Dostoievski's "Journal" and Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonnata". I also enjoy children's books, especially Brothers Grimm stories, or Russian classical stories! These are the only books that come to my mind right now!

Perhaps you would also enjoy Aesop's fables - they are often thought of as a source for children, but the key points are usually profound.

I'm a fan of Dostoievski, Tolstoy & most of the late 19th century Russian writers, but I wouldn't include either the Kreutzer Sonata or Dostoievskis "Journal of a Writer" among my favorites. Both men, in my opinion, wrote other much better works. Very little in literature beats the extended dialogue between Ivan and Alexy Karamazov in part 3 (I think) of "the Brotherts Kara... "You might also like Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Diary" or Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time" (1835). Both are very modern in their content.

Cleopatra by Sir Henry Rider Haggard. Also The Holy Bible of course.

I can't think of a novel I can easily read again and again other than Victor Hugo‘s Les Miserables.

Great contributions, folks.

It occurred to me as I flipped through this thread that I read Kafka's Metamorphosis three times. Each reading was at a different time in my life. I had very different reactions, depending on the age I was when I read it.

I will occasionally reread some poetry. Shakespeare sonnets (most recent), Wordworth. Poe, and Burns.

Love to hear more about your experience with the Kafka.

Sure, Deb. The first time I read Metamorphosis I was very young (a teenager in college). I thought it was strange--almost like a horror story.

The second time I read it, I was in my late twenties. I was fascinated in an intellectual way with what was happening to Gregor. (Holy moley, I remember his name.) I was interested in the psychological aspects of the story. His relationship with the members of his family.

The last time I read it, I was in my forties. I thought it was one of the saddest things I'd ever read. I may have even cried.

It has stayed with me because the story never changed. I did.

It's a haunting, awful tale, isn't it?

Yes, haunting and awful. I keep picturing the apple someone hurled at him rotting in his flesh.

well, i loved Peter Pan when i was little (and i still do), the brave tin soldier, Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventure of Huckleberry Fin and many others that i still kept them in my shelf and i am hoping that when the time comes, my children will read them and like them as much as i did.

I hope so too!

He was a very proficient plagarist. He took "Montezuma's Daughter" from the biography of Bernal Diaz and "Eric Brighteyes" from the Icelandic sagas. I suspect several of his other works, except perhaps "She" had similar origins.

Several books I have read repeatedly. They tend to be works which appeal to some inner part of me, in many cases I relate directly to characters and story at the same time.

There is one book which I've mostly read a few times; but, have never,completed, that being Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. There's just an uneasy feeling I have about completing it and so the last 10 pages have never been read. It isn't that the book isn't good; or that, I am expecting some strange twist. There's just some weird feeling I get. It's a wonderful book and I can feel the events taking place within the story and visualize every place mentioned, maybe someday I will be able to finish it.

That's interesting.....