Books I will always return to

[titania7]

Daniel,
Excellent choices regarding re-reads. The books by Marquez and Camus are three of my favorites.

I know you mentioned this on a different thread, but, I must say, Daniel, I'm delighted to hear you're going to check out some of Junichiro's work. In addition to The Gourmet Club, I also recommend Naomi and Some Prefer Nettles, though I haven't yet "officially" read them (they're on my to-be-read shelf and I haven't been able to resist thumbing through them! )

Best,
Titania

"That which has always been accepted by everyone,
everywhere, is almost certain to be false."
~Paul Valery

[titania7]

Ok. I know everyone is curious! So...how can I resist? Posting
the books I love to return to, that is . Here are a few of them--
I'm listing them off the top of my head; so, if I leave a few out,
I'm not going to blame myself.

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Cousin Bette by Honore de Balzac
The Bell-Jar by Sylvia Plath
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Embers by Sandor Marai
Smoke by Ivan Turgenev
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine
Don Casmurro by Machido de Assis
Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy
A Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
Cousin Bazilio by Eca De Queiroz
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Woman in the Dunes by Abe Kobo
The Crime of Father Amaro by Eca De Queiroz
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Emilio's Carnival by Italo Svevo
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy


Plays:

The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot
Don Juan by Moliere
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
MacBeth by William Shakespeare
The Guardsman by Ferenc Molnar
The Night of the Toreadors by Jean Anouilh
The Lark by Jean Anouilh
The Physicists by Friedrich Durrenmatt
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
The Lady By the Sea by Henrik Ibsen
Brand by Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
A Dream Play by August Strindberg
Miss Julie by August Strindberg
The Important of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
The Night of the Iguana by Tennesse Williams
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Virgin Bride by Strindberg
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Easter by Strindberg
The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky
I am A Camera by Christopher Isherwood
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw

Yes, Ibsen and Strindberg are my two favorite playwrights.
Rarely do I enjoy reading plays as much as I do other literature.
But, I must make an exception for these two Masters of Drama.

Both these lists became much longer than I intended for them
to! What can I say? I'm passionate about a lot of the books
I've read--and read again.

Collections of short stories include:

Complete stories of Truman Capote
Complete stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Complete stories of Flannery O'Connor
Complete stories of Guy De Maupassant
Complete stories of Edith Wharton
Complete stories of Anton Chekhov
Complete stories of Henry James
Complete stories of Edgar Allan Poe

The reason these collections of stories are so important to me is
because I know that I can return to them again and again.....
and never be disappointed.

I'm sure I left someone out . Oh, well.....

~Titania

[Beth]

Each winter I get the itch to revisit My Antonia by Willa Cather. Last read it 3 or 4 years ago so waiting for a hard freeze or some permafrost in the freezer. Also, I've reread Silas Marner 2 or 3 times and will read it again at some point.

[titania7]

Beth,
Good choices. Can't beat Cather or Eliot. My personal favorite
of Cather's oeuvre is The Song of the Lark. But My Antonia
is also fabulous, as are several of her other works, especially
Death Comes for the Archbishop.

~Titania

[Jayaprakash]

It's an odd lot, skewed towards non fiction, which doesn't reflect my usual reading patterns, but here it is:

The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters - George Orwell
Les Fleurs Du Mal - Charles Baudelaire
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Swamy And Friends - RK Narayan
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
The Roving Mind - Isaac Asimov
Do What You Will - Aldous Huxley
The Panda's Thumb - Stephen Jay Gould

The stories of Poe and Lovecraft. Various favourites by PG Wodehouse and from Richmal Crompton's William books. The Sandman comics. Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing. Howard The Duck.

[titania7]

Jayaprakash,
As always, wonderful choices. Glad to see Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal on your list. It's a masterpiece that invites re-reading, isn't it?
Which reminds me.....I've misplaced my copy of it! This, of course, isn't my fault, for, as I've said before, my house has clutter
issues .

I haven't read enough of Lovecraft's stories. I shall have to
sample more!

Best,
Titania

"Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time
impresses on our sensibility."
~Charles Baudelaire

[Ramblingsid]

I must admit I am not really a re-reader of novels but there are books I return to time and time again.

Usually poetry and anthologies of some kind.

Two that spring to mind:

I have had "A Radical Reader" for about 25 years and often dip into it and re-read favourite passages. It's a collection of extracts etc from radical writers/thinkers from the time of John Ball's

"When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then a gentleman?"

down to the early twentieth century.

And I have had my copy of "The Faber Book of Modern Verse" since about 1974 and it remains in one piece in spite of fairly constant use over the years.

This is a very short list compared with Titania's but if my re-reading list was that long I don't think I'd have any time for new reading

[Funhouse]

I'm an English teacher, so I frequently have to reread books that I teach over multiple years. I rarely reread books otherwise, for the same reason that others have stated: there's so much out there that I haven't read even once yet and that I'm dying to get to.

Sometimes the rereads are a chore (To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World); other times they're a source of unalloyed joy (Hamlet, The Quiet American, Maus).

[titania7]

Originally Posted by Ramblingsid

This is a very short list compared with Titania's but if my re-reading list was that long I don't think I'd have any time for new reading

Ramblingsid,
Rest assured I don't re-read all the books I listed at the same time .
Actually, I mostly try to read things I haven't read....then add
a re-read into the mix. My current choice is D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love.

Best,
Titania

[noemi]

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche