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The group dynamic here at GR has had me rereading many things that I might only have read once. I find that rereading with an active, thoughtful group often adds enormously to my initial impression. However, there are books I've revisited again and again for a variety of reasons. I have several related questions... Which books have you retread most often? Which book, upon revisit, was the most satisfying or most altered in your impression. Which book would you most highly recommend to be slated for revisiting?

Re-read most often, probably Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. Of adult books, hard to say but books read several times at least include Paradise Lost, The Republic, The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, Middlemarch, Barchester Towers, Bleak House, Gaudy Night, Parnassus on Wheels, among others.

I don't include Shakespeare plays, some of which I have read a dozen times. Nor do I count poetry -- can't even think how often I've read Gray's Elegy.

Ooo. Parnassus on Wheels looks promising. It's a title I've never read. Must go track it down!

Renee wrote: "Ooo. Parnassus on Wheels looks promising. It's a title I've never read. Must go track it down!"

It's pure fun with books. Great bedtime or hammock reading.

I tend not to read books again, so will have to think about this for awhile. (Undoubtedly a few exist among my many books, and many I do pull from the shelf for recollection or to look for something I am certain had been noted--or not. ;-) )

In the meantime, enjoy this quotation from Tessa Hadley. One of her novels, The Past, was a recent nominee on the 21st Century Literature board (was not selected) and is my f2f group selection for the upcoming month:

“I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things � you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw � it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences � the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.�
� Tessa Hadley

I like re-reading Wuthering Heights and Far from the madding crowd. There is something in these two novels which I reach for when alone so that I could forget everything and just get lost in the old world.

Wonderful quote, Lily!

That is a great quote!

Never heard of Parnassus either so making a note, and Gaudy Night is waiting to be savoured (loved the previous two with Harriet) :O)

Majority of my reading focuses on 'new' books (to me), although sometimes I might need to read something at least twice to get the full meaning. There are a few however that I love to re-visit:
Every 5-10 years >The Woman in White, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Dracula, and Jane Austen's novels
At Christmas > LOTR, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
Cheer up > LM Montgomery's The Blue Castle
Fun > Ready Player One, Harry Potter, Agatha Christie
Add to this the comics I read growing up and love to experience again and again (Blake & Mortimer and Yoko Tsuno)

Lily wrote: "I tend not to read books again, so will have to think about this for awhile."

I live by the saying "any book worth reading is worth re-reading."

And like Renee and Veronique, I love your quote. And agree with it completely. There are depths to great books that can only be appreciated on rereading. I remember Elizabeth Vandiver, who gave the Teaching Company lectures on the Iliad and Odyssey, commenting that she had been rereading them every year for her classes, and still found new insights in them. Now that's a great book!

Love the quote!

As a rule I don't re-read entertainment novels. Even though I am slowly re-reading the Tony Hillerman's. I am a goner when it comes to the American Southwest setting :)

Over many years I didn't read many classics. Now that I've renewed my focus on them, I haven't gotten to the stage yet where I want to re-read them. There are so many titles I have yet to read or get re-acquainted with! OK- that's technically a re-read) ;)

Everyman wrote: "I live by the saying 'any book worth reading is worth re-reading'...."

I say the same, with this twist: "I try to select only books worth re-reading, even if I never do." [g]

Glad so many of you enjoyed the quotation from Tessa Hadley. Since I have learned to do at least some re-reading, I have come to appreciate what she says. I should give Eman credit as one of the people who has slowly, over the past almost ten years, impacted the amount of re-reading I do. Even for the simplest books, one sees new things in different ways. I quite agree that there are a number of books I haven't fully enjoyed because or when I've tried to grasp them in a single read -- Homer, Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Lowry, Cortázar are only a few of the authors that belong in that category for me. But Austen certainly gets richer with every read. Or Dr. Seuss. Morrison's Beloved was dreadful on the first read, the one or two subsequent reads have helped place it in context. Can't say that I have re-read the entire Bible, but some books of it are probably among those I have most revisited, especially Job, the Synoptic Gospels, and some of the letters of Paul, as well as parts of Genesis, Ecclesiastics, and Song of Solomon -- and the Psalms, of course. (The local kidding is my fascination with the Lamentations among the Psalms -- the solace of crying out injustice in the tradition of millennia of humans, then moving to re-affirm hope. The number of (Christian) people I encounter who have not read even an entire book of the Bible amaze me -- they know it as quotations, stories, or parables.) Perhaps my favorite re-reads are stories and poems from childhood -- whether my own or shared with our son. I do like to re-read or listen again to Tolstoy and Pushkin. Every few years I will seek out ¸éø±ô±¹²¹²¹²µ's Giants in the Earth. For inspiration I'll turn to How to Live in the World and Still Be Happy by Hugh Prather.

Since I lived in both Vermont and the Midwest, this poem is for me the classic introduction to the snowstorm so different than the blizzard of the Plains:
For many years, I had "lost" it -- until the search capabilities of the Internet made it so easy to find.