Books to return to

I keep a list of all-time favorite books that I revisit from time to time, but I’m aware that there’s a certain tendency to cheat by including a work that looks impressive but isn’t really an all-time favorite. (I did resist the temptation to include The Man Without Qualities just to show off that I made it through all three volumes.)

A more interesting and probably more honest sort of list would be a list of books that one has read more than once. Here’s mine, as best as I can reconstruct it. I have not included books that I reread in the line of duty, only those reread for pleasure. Someday it will probably be possible to put a list like this into a computer and reach some startlingly accurate conclusions about the personality of the reader.

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble
The Ice Age by Margaret Drabble
The Radiant Way trilogy by Margaret Drabble
The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher
Twentyone Twice by Mark Harris

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Rage in Harlem (and others) by Chester Himes
The Courage of Turtles by Edward Hoagland
Amerika by Franz Kafka
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed by John McPhee
Redburn by Herman Melville
The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell
The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, and Cities of the Plain by Marcel Proust (I’ve read the later volumes, but not more than once)
The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
Men of Concord by Henry David Thoreau
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien