This week’s Top Ten Tuesday from the folks over at The Broke and the Bookish asks for the top ten books you’d like to re-read. You can participate in this blog hop by clicking on this link and heading over to The Broke and the Bookish.
There are books I do re-read from time to time, some of them more regularly than others. Pride and Prejudice. Catcher in the Rye. To the Lighthouse. James Baldwin essays. Some Barbara Kingsolver. I’m currently re-reading (rather slowly) Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. But I’m going to focus on the things I would like to re-read rather than the things I do re-read in this list.
In no particular order of importance:
1. Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry. Yes, you’d think this would be on the list of things I perpetually read over, but I lost the copy I bought, and haven’t replaced it. So I have not re-read this.
2. The Harry Potter books. I started reading them again last fall with my stepdaughter. But then it got to be towards the end of the year, and I wanted to hit the 100 books read in a year mark, and once you get past Book Three, those are not particular fast reads. I really want to re-read the last book now after having read Emily’s post over at As the Crowe Flies (And Reads!), where she has some interesting things to say about the last book.
3. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I’m honestly not sure if these would be re-reads. They’re the kind of stories that you absorb by osmosis in our culture, to the point where you can’t remember anymore whether you read them or not.
4. Turn of the Screw, by Henry Miller. I have re-read this. Not that long ago. But it throws me for a loop every time. I keep waiting for the moment when I really get it. It hasn’t happened yet.
5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. I bought this book at Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, Mississippi, the last time I was visiting and almost didn’t want to talk to my friends because I was so immersed in that book. What a great read.
6. How to Be Good, by Nick Hornby. I started to re-read this recently, and then got distracted.
7. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. Remember loving it in college. I have no idea what I’d think about it now.
8. Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger. Another favorite, from all the way back in high school. The source of my interest in The Way of the Pilgrim, which I have still not read.
9. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. I think you must read this book in perpetuity in order to fully understand everything Dillard is saying. The beautiful thing about this book is that you don’t so much mind the moments when you don’t understand.
10. Wise Blood, by Flannery O’Connor. This is one of those books I think about often. So often that I’m not sure anymore how much of what I know about the book is actually from the book as opposed to things I just created in my memories of the book.
So now it’s interesting to see that my list contains a lot of Southern fiction, and a lot of classics. Which I guess makes sense. If you’re going to recover old territory, it better be good (classics) and familiar (Southern).
What would you like to re-read?
Speak Your Mind