I have returned time and again to Through the Looking-Glass; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; lately to Pride & Prejudice. I used to read Franny & Zooey and Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter every year but then felt that doing so was making me sick in the head. They were just too intense. So JD Salinger was a youthful fancy that I shook off, but I still read e.e. cummings with delight all the time. This is a bit off topic, but once after a accidentally long period of silence I called my friend Nick and recounted how I still knew his phone number by heart and that the phone numbers of people you're really close to are often not in your address book (this is last century technology, I realize) because you just always KNOW them .... and he said books were the same: you never have your favorite books on the shelf because you've either lent them out or are currently reading them. It's so true! P&P is next to the bed right now, and I loaned out Looking-Glass and The Lion &c. I read a fantastic quote from Patrick O'Brian, who said there were six novels worth reading, and that he read them every year. I think we know which six he was talking about! :)

No, the Six Novels are Jane Austen!

(I don't buy books much, either ... except for the kiddies)

I actually just reread To Kill a Mocking Bird and saw it through a whole new light now that I am an adult. I first read it when I was a freshman in HS and I was amazed at how different my perspective was on it now that I'm a parent. I sympathized with Atticus much more than I did as a child. I think this realization has inspired me to revisit some other of my old favorites. Great blog post!

I've read "The Fountainhead" twice a year since i discovered almost two decades ago. It inspires me due to the cold purity of the ideas (with which I agree) and finding nuance where Ms. Rand tested those ideas. In tomes of that girth there is always more detail to discover. Any book with detail and creativity has the same effect. I refuse to tell you how many times I've read Frank Herbert's Dune series - all of it. And while I've yet to do it in a linear fashion the Bible is something I still return to on a regular basis (The New King James being my preferred translation).

In all of these examples - there was a lot of material, the author had a point, the author wanted you to get the point and not forget it.

On the smaller scale - Through the Looking Glass has required multiple readings over the last 30 years as has The Jungle Book and Watership Down. A good story is a good story every time.

The one modern example would be Genesis by Bernard Beckett. I read that one through three times straight in stolen moments over the course of a week. I wish I knew him so he would let me write the screenplay - it would be the best psy-fi thriller of all time. <grin>

I rarely reread books, mostly because I'm always looking for something new. Still, of the books that I've consciously returned to, Jane Eyre and To Kill a Mockingbird were two I enjoyed even more the second time around. I think this has a lot to do with how immature I was on the first read; I probably understood the book's quality a great deal more on the second. There are other books that I've re-read because I wanted to re-experience the way I felt when I read them the first time. For the longest time I held The Robber Bride and White Noise up as the two greatest books I'd ever read. This had more to do with the fantasy world these books created for me and how I felt in them than any sort of admiration for character or narrative. Regrettably, I could not recover the experience and the books sort of fell flat as a result. Again, I attribute this let-down to my maturity when I first read these books (in college). Both books have characters who are academics, and now that I've lived as one for a few years, I'm not as excited by the characters. Consequently, I'm a little worried that I might damage my memory of how great a book is if I reread it.

There are very few books that I have re-read. Not because I didn't enjoy them, but simply due to lack of time due to working full-time and being a parent. So many books, so little time! It wasn't until the last few years that I could pleasure read again. Now I'm reading books that my kids are reading so we can have our own little book club. However, when I was a teenager I read Gone with the Wind three times and saw the movie countless times. (The book is much better, but they got the characters right in the movie.) I was fascinated by the strong female characters and how they protrayed feminity during adversity. Everytime I read it I got something new out of it.