Jump to content

What Books Do You Read Repeatedly?


BenjaminNicholas

Recommended Posts

If you're an avid reader, there's always those group of authors and stories that you keep coming back to.

 

For me, it's Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Even though he eventually became mostly a television talk show couch-fixture, I credit Capote for starting an entirely new genre of writing that has remained successful to this day. It's also just a brilliantly written book.

 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. The film adap was just okay, but the book was riveting.

 

David Merrick: The Abominable Showman by Howard Kissel. Great stories in the days when theatre producers could get away with anything. If you have come from a PR background, watching Merrick's cat & mouse game of keeping his shows on top is fascinating.

 

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson is as long (and bitter) as the old testament, but it's worth a read. It's refreshing to see a bio that's straight-forward, pulls no punches and has the blessing of the subject all the way onto his deathbed. It's an opus, but it's an easy read.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Enjoy spy novels with a common thread/character book after book. Daniel Silva writes of an art restorer who is also a spy who saves much of the world in every story. Robert Ludlam and his many novels with Jason Borne "The Borne Identity", etc was fun as well.

Also, I like the characters developed by John Irving, like TS Garp in "The World according to Garp, or Owen Meaney in "A prayer for Owen Meaney". His characters are all very human: they get knocked down but get up, they fail but try again, occasionally they succeed and there is a great joy.

Reading about familiar characters book after book is comforting in a small way. One knows what to expect, more or less. That's unusual these days.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

At the moment I’m rereading Patricia Highsmith. I love noir fiction, especially fond of Raymond Chandler. But there is something about Highsmith. Ignore the movies (Ripley especially) - most of them take the characters, rewrite the book and shift it around to achieve a clearer or more morally coherent narrative. Because she isn’t about narrative/moral clarity, she is the master of suspenseful anxiety. Draws the reader into her strange world, where there is always a crime but you have no idea what’s going to happen. No one is the good or bad guy. There is no necessary linkage between act and consequence. I find that true to life. Her style is deceptively simple, plainer than Hemingway, but not as an affectation, as in H. The voice is authorial but the point of view shifts from character to character. Every time I reread her I am amazed at how subtle her texts are. Always something new.

Edited by BgMstr4u
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Why would one read a book repeatedly? For one, there are many fish in the sea. Two, what do you gain when you ignore a book so that you can read another one repeatedly?

Granted, a second reading often shows you new insights that you missed upon the first reading, but, I submit, it is a diminishing return.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For me, it's Common Ground:  A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, by the late J. Anthony Lukas.  It's about Boston's school busing crisis, in the 1970's, and it tells about how three American families dealt with the overall situation, their viewpoints, and their overall perspectives of Boston's school crisis, and the fact that they all had one thing in common:  Raising up kids in Boston proper, dealing with a lousy school system that basically failed students regardless of ethnicity, race or color.   The three families, the Divers, a Yankee family from Lexingington who purchased a condominium in Boston's South End and moved there to see what they could do to help non-whites and to facilitate an integrated neighborhood, the Twymons, an impoverished African American family from Lower Roxbury and the South End, whose household was headed by a single mother who was raising a slue of kids in a subsidized housing project, and wanted them to have a better education than they were getting in their own neighborhood(s), and wanted her children to have a better education than they were getting in the black schools,  and the McGoffs, an impoverished Irish-Catholic-American family, whose household was also headed by a single  mother raising seven kids in a subsidizing housing project, and were vehemently opposed to busing.  The McGoff kids, however, reacted very differently, ranging from actively resisting the Federal Court-mandated busing order, to concentrating on their athletics and being somewhat more laid back about mandatory school busing, despite not openly favoring it. 

Although Rachel Twymon, the mother of her children, was supportive of the Federal Court-ordered mandatory school edict, due to wanting a better education for her children, she began to sour on the idea when, after riding the bus up to Charlestown High School on a number of occasions and observing not only what many of the white students and their parents in Charlestown were doing in order to resist it,  but  when Rachel Twymon saw the condition of Charlestown High School, which was just as run-down and educationally as those in Roxbury, Lower Roxbury and the South End, she herself became unhappy about the whole situation.  Although the blacks and other non-white students formed a Minority Students Council for protection, and Rachel Twymon joined a Racial-Ethnic Council in the hopes that peaceful integration of the schools would take place,  that did not happen, due to white resistance from many white students and parents alike.   

Many of the boys in both families got into crime and on the wrong side of the  law, and the girls in the Twymon family not only  got into dating men much older than they were, but also got into  sex and hanging out until all hours, and the younger daughter ended up pregnant, and giving birth to a child out of wedlock, and becoming a mother at an extremely early age.  

Not only did Common Ground:  A  Turbulent Decade in the Life of Three American Families  tell about how the three families coped with Boston's school busing crisis, but this particular book also pointed out the role that the Catholic Church, The Boston School Committee headed by Louise Day Hicks, then-Mayor Kevin Hagan White, the Boston Police, and the Federal District Judge W. Arthur Garrity (who was from Worcester, MA), and the media, including the Boston Globe played in the effort to integrate Boston's public schools.  

All told, Common Ground:  A  Turbulent Decade in the Life of Three American Families is a fascinating book, which I highly recommend!   It was written in 1985, but is only available in paperback, and is still a very popular book.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, Lucky said:

@mploHow many times have your read this book?

(Laughing)  To be truthful, I've read J. Anthony Lukas's book, "Common Ground:  A Turbulent Decade in the Life of Three American Families" more times than I'm able or willing to count.😀

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/1/2021 at 10:08 PM, oldNbusted said:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is one of those books I pick up repeatedly, thinking I am just going to read a scene or a passage and end up reading the whole thing again. Everything I've needed to know about human behavior, I learned from this book.

Wow!! It sounds like an interesting book.  I've heard of it, but never read it, however.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
6 hours ago, Lucky said:

This weekend I read Bangkok 8 by John Burdett for the third time. Does that count as "repeatedly?"

It's such a good novel about Bangkok and Thailand.

Now that I’ve been there I should read it again (and this time take notes about where to get the best street food). 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/20/2021 at 6:44 AM, Lucky said:

This weekend I read Bangkok 8 by John Burdett for the third time. Does that count as "repeatedly?"

It's such a good novel about Bangkok and Thailand.

And yesterday I read John Burdett's The Last Six Million Seconds (1997), about intrigue and corruption as Britain gets ready to hand over Hong Kong to China. This novel I highly recommend.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 6/2/2021 at 9:08 AM, Lucky said:

Why would one read a book repeatedly? For one, there are many fish in the sea. Two, what do you gain when you ignore a book so that you can read another one repeatedly?

Granted, a second reading often shows you new insights that you missed upon the first reading, but, I submit, it is a diminishing return.

It was a question that clearly has an audience by the number of replies. 

Also noted, you repeatedly keep coming back to this thread to respond :)

 

 

Edited by Benjamin_Nicholas
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I rarely revisit a book in its entirety - the ones I really do lose myself in (Follett’s historical fiction e.g.) are longer, too long for a rerun. My favorite re-read are Maupin’s Tales of the City series. A publishing gap of 17 years required a re-read of Books 1-6 before Michael Tolliver Lives. I re-read all of them for pleasure after I had pre-ordered the last: Days of Anna Madrigal.

TV Adaptations were pretty good, but obviously incomplete.  And missing the author’s dry narrative voice.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was introduced to Tales of the City by a friend in San Francisco while I was there for work.  We bought a copy before bar-hopping and I toted it around all night. I felt like Captain Kirk carrying "A Tale of Two Cities" in Wrath of Khan 🤓  I may bring the series on vacation this year for a re-read.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...