What books have you read more than once?

[Timsup2nothin]

I reread almost everything I read. Something has to be pretty darn bad for me not to pick it up again.

There are too many books I haven't read for me to reread one that I have, though admittedly I was thinking of fiction when I said that I never do it. I did read The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler more than once because the first time it seemed likely that I had missed some points and I was at sea so couldn't run out and find the rest of his books. There might be a couple others along similar lines and/or for similar reasons. Yeah, Megatrends by John Naisbitt is another. I read my econ textbook three times.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I don't think I've ever re-read a complete book. I have re-read parts of a non-fiction books I needed for studying or work or whatever to refresh my memory but have never done the same for fiction.

 

[Estebonrober]

Asoiaf books
Wheel of Time books
Lotr books
Never reread nonfiction though

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I reread the Foundation Trilogy because I felt I didn't understand it all the first time. And finally I reread 'PART' of the DUNE series to point out exactly where it all went wrong. How about you?

I made the mistake of deciding to read Foundation right after getting out of a grueling sociology final in college. I lasted maybe two pages, put it down, and never picked it up again. That was in 1982.

But Dune? I've read Frank Herbert's books, re-read, re-re-read them, and more times still (it came with the territory after I started hanging out on Dune forums and ended up running one; it took joining that forum before I understood most of God Emperor of Dune). I've even read The Making of Dune (the Lynch movie) and National Lampoon's DOON multiple times. There are parts of the Dune Encyclopedia I've read multiple times, as some forum arguments and YT arguments require citations to prove that the person I'm arguing with has either misremembered something or never knew what they were talking about in the first place.

To me it doesn't seem any more odd than re-watching a film or a TV programme.

Exactly. That's what I said to a friend who never reads anything more than once. I pointed out that she's watched "The Pyramids of Mars" (a Fourth Doctor story I'm not fond of since it has moronic, shambling mummies) numerous times in a single day, never mind over a period of years, and she said, "That's different."

Down the Long Wind by Gillian Bradshaw

I've read several of her books, but haven't heard of this one. What is it about?

Last year I re-read The Beacon at Alexandria and The Bearkeeper's Daughter. There's another one I'm trying to track down, having read it at the library and want my own copy: Imperial Purple.

I reread almost everything I read. Something has to be pretty darn bad for me not to pick it up again.

I made a rule decades ago about my books. No book comes into my home unless I'm willing to read it at least twice (obviously this applies to fiction, not non-fiction, although I have read Isaac Asimov's autobiography twice - it spans three very large volumes).

I think I've finished almost every book I've ever written except for my foray into fan fiction. That experiment ended quite quickly. Mostly garbage.

Most fanfic isn't very good when a person is starting out. My own first efforts were really cringeworthy. It takes practice, which is why I'm always encouraging people to try NaNoWriMo (next session starts in April; I'll be starting a thread in A&E soon).

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the only book I have read more than twice.

I've read it probably a half-dozen times. It's the only one of Heinlein's Future History novels I'd like to see adapted to movie form. It introduces the concept of TANSTAAFL and the saying, "Throw rocks at them, Man."


My own list would include almost the entire Alliance-Union series by C.J. Cherryh (there are two of them I haven't read; one is an old one I somehow missed and the other was just published and I'm holding out for the paperback edition which won't be available until November this year). I love settling in for a re-read of Cyteen, as it's one of the most complex SF novels I've ever tackled, and I gain new insights every time I read it.

 

[abradley]

I read for enjoyment and learning so often I'll read something and then peruse it later, lately my list includes 'Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris, ', 'War! What is it Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots' by Ian Morris.

Civilization: The West and the Rest,” by Niall Ferguson.

and

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,
How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity,
The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion all by Rodney Stark

Those I've read and am now perusing now.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Could you use a bigger font please? I've misplaced my reading glasses.

 

[tjs282]

No book comes into my home unless I'm willing to read it at least twice

This is pretty much my rule as well. I've re-read nearly everything on my bookshelf at least once, most more than that. I would estimate that I re-read most of my books at least once a decade, so the books I've had the longest have likely been re-read at least 3 or 4 times by now (Iain Banks and Terry Pratchett get a special mention here!).

Latest re-reads were all more recent than that though: I first read The Fractal Prince, Leviathan Wakes, and Annihilation between 2 and 4 years ago, but all fall into the category of first-novel-in-a-series-whose-sequels-I-was-gifted-recently, so all of those got re-read before I started on the sequels.

 

[Thorgalaeg]

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (4 or 5 times), The City and the Stars by A. C. Clarke, most of the stories included in Ficciones and El Aleph by Borges, El Quijote (first time partially second time full). Plus a bunch of lesser sci-fi tittles i read twice when i was a kid but i would never read now.

 

[AmazonQueen]

I've read several of her books, but haven't heard of this one. What is it about?

Last year I re-read The Beacon at Alexandria and The Bearkeeper's Daughter. There's another one I'm trying to track down, having read it at the library and want my own copy: Imperial Purple.

Its an Arthurian trilogy focused on Gwalmachai (Gawaine) as the central character. Best modern version I've read and I read almost anything I could find vaguely Arthurian when I used to run campaigns for the Pendragon RPG. I once lent it to a friend who left it in a taxi when he was drunk Took years to find another copy.

 

[Morty]

I'll have re-read most of my Terry Pratchett books a few times....often to try and pick up some of the more subtle jokes that I've missed the first time.

Otherwise I think I've read Magician (Raymond E Feist) a few times, and probably a number of Clive Cussler books (because some times it's reassuring to read a book where you know it's going to have a happy ending where the guy saves the world and gets the girl all in the last seconds before the bomb goes bang!)

Non-fiction wise I'll often pick one up again for re-reading. Currently on Bill Bryson's "At Home: A Short History of Private Life" - just because!

 

[EgonSpengler]

I almost never re-read books. One that I've read a few times is Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Another series I should mention is the Hulzein Saga by F.M. Busby. He stopped writing books in the '90s out of protest for how badly authors were treated by publishers and marketers, and so we only ever got 8 novels in that series. I've scoured the internet looking for fanfic, and only found one lone person on LiveJournal, wondering the same thing: How is it that nobody has written fanfic about this series?

So I decided to do it myself. There are a ton of unanswered questions in that series, plot threads left dangling, and some glaring inconsistencies that were obvious once I started plotting the events on a timeline. Busby is one of the few SF authors who made STL travel such an integral part of the story not only for travel, but for how to construct an interstellar commerce system and even social mores (as in what to do when you're 20 or more years out of sync with the family you left behind on some planet and when you return you've only lived a couple of years while everyone you loved is two decades older... and you might accidentally get together with someone you don't realize is your niece, nephew, or younger/older sibling because you don't recognize them). But once you have to start accounting for this thing of a year on a ship could equal 15-20 years on Earth, some people and events get hopelessly muddled up. So to make my additions to the stories make sense I've had to revise Busby's timeline to start everything off over 50 years earlier. Otherwise, it would overrun the specific date mentioned at the end of one of the novels when Earth's totalitarian government is finally defeated.

I started filling in some of the blanks in this series for one of my NaNoWriMo projects and one of Synsensa's writing challenges on another forum, which of course necessitated re-reading everything. But that's okay, since I've already read the series a dozen times or so, and by now I probably know it better than Busby himself ever did (he died years ago, and I remember asking him about one of the most glaring inconsistencies to do with one of the secondary characters, and he hadn't realized that it had happened).

 

[Kozmos]

The Prince of Nothing/Aspect Emperor series. They are dense with meaning and reading through a second time you catch all the things you didn't know to look for before. Besides that nothing. I get that 'yeah yeah you read this' nagging feeling in my brain when I tried to read stuff I already read before.

 

[Cutlass]

Far, far, too many to ever count or remember.

 

[Dachs]

I read for enjoyment and learning so often I'll read something and then peruse it later, lately my list includes 'Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris, ', 'War! What is it Good For?: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots' by Ian Morris.

Civilization: The West and the Rest,” by Niall Ferguson.

and

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success,
How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity,
The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion all by Rodney Stark

Those I've read and am now perusing now.

Wow. Those are...ah...huh...interesting choices.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I don't usually reread books as I don't have a lot of spare time, but I have reread John Varley's Titan, Wizard and Demon a few times. I have also reread the original Dune novels (yes, even God Emperor...), Also the Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke.

Beyond that, it's a fresh read every time.

 

[Sofista]

Everything by Jane Austen (except for Northanger Abbey, because I'm keeping something for my old age). Time and again.

 

[really]

I have re-read Terry Pratchett's books.

 

[rah]

Of course I'm looking forward to older age where I can reread a book and quickly forget it. Think of all the money I'll save.

 

[Arakhor]

I've probably read every book in the Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium and Tamuli series by David & Leigh Eddings (18 books in total) at least two or three times, but not in the last 10 years or more. I don't read nearly enough these days.