Are there any novels you’ve read multiple times?

Mmmmmm....Anna Madrigal, a trans woman, was at the center of the entire series from Book One so I don't know what you're nattering on about with "Big Trans".

The first book is great fun but the next two are very similar...all written as a serial in the San Francisco Chronicle...4th book, Babycakes was the transition to the AIDS era but is also a terrfiic book. The last two books in the original series of six, were a bit of a mixed bag as the characters struggled with life in the 80s. But, still strongly written books.

The most recent four books written 20 years later aren't as good but it was still interesting to catch up with the characters.

The only "off putting" Tales of the City installment was the final TV miniseries on HBO. It was a poor adaptation of one of the later books with too much emphasis on new, young characters no one really cared about. The show runner was some stupid young woman who wasn't even aware of Tales of the City or a fan.

The Catcher In the Rye. The Bell Jar.

I'm fun at parties.

TRUDY PHILLIPS New Girl

Also its sequel TRUDY PHILLIPS Headline Year. They belonged to my big sister and I read and re-read them several times.

Gatsby, The Road, The Bluest Eye.

I love those books and read them once every five years or so.

I used to re-read War and Peace during the holidays each year. I love Tolstoy.

Most of the classic Russian ones.

No, one and done.

The Goldfinch

Not a novel, but I had to read Hamlet multiple times in college because everyone in English Lit teaches it.

The Group

Diary Of A Mad Housewife

Persuasion.

The Stand,Gone With The Wind,The John Jakes Kent family chronicles ,I was mad for Edna Buchanan too. I have lots of books I love to reread ,even a few from childhood like Gone Away Lake,The Borrowers (all of them) Little House Series etc. It may be a decade before I reread them but Im always happy when I do.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

The Feast of All Saints.

The Oracle Glass.

Only a few of the classics…

The Shining by Stephen King

Devolution by Max Brooks

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

Yes, Gene Wolfe's tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, which really can't be well understood without one or more re-readings. There's a podcast about his works called "ReReading Wolfe" based on this notion

The Count of Monte Cristo

The Winds of War / War and Remembrance (skipped the Nazi parts after the first reading; mostly interested in Natalie and her uncle)

Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

The Chosen - Chaim Potok

The Promise - Chaim Potok

all my Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books

Dancer from the Dance - Andrew Holleran, and all his other books

some of Felice Picano's novels

Faggots - Larry Kramer

Call Me by Your Name - Andre Aciman

The Classic Italian Cookbook - Marcella Hazan

Entertaining - Martha Stewart

Early from the Dance - David Payne

The first four Tales of the City books

most of Michael Connolly's Bosch books

The White Album - Joan Didion, plus other LA writers: Kate Braverman, Eve Babitz, Maritta Wolff

Some of Michael Cunningham's books. I don't remember the titles.

The Great Gatsby

A Tale of Two Cities

the starbridge chronicles by paul park

soldiers of paradise sugar rain the cult of loving kindness

the trilogy is now out of print, but i loved it enough to read it many times. a hypnotic fever dream of power, violence, religion, and madness in a distant world. great myth making and world building.

vanity fair by thackeray.

a tale of two cities by dickens

les miserables by victor hugo

Pride and Prejudice many times, the other Jane Austen novels a few times. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sometimes I will skip a full rereading and just go right to some of my favorite passages of various novels I've enjoyed through the years.

Blood Meridian

Wolf Hall

Lord of the Rings

misc Raymond Chandler novels

The Thornbirds

Gone WT Wind

Anna Karenina

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

Faces in the Water

Buddenbrooks

The Good Soldier

Portrait of a Lady

The Bell Jar

I'm not sure r18 understood the assignment

Because I listed four non-fiction books, r25, in 19 entries? You ARE the prissiest sissy.

- r18

Giovanni 's Room and the Picture of Dorian Grey

In the 1980s, I read some of the middling NYC 1980s novels a few times.

While in college, I finished reding "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt and then started reading it again right that very minute.

That never happened before or happen again.

And in HS in the 70s I read a few Joan Didion novels a few times because I wanted to learn how to be a cool elegant bitch.

The Lord of the Rings series by Tolkien

The Riddlemaster by Patricia McKillip

The Dresden series by Jim Butcher

Salem’s Lot, The Dead Zone, Christine, It

The House of Mirth

A novel most of you probably never heard of, Paradise Postponed by the British author John Mortimer (father of Emily and author of the Rumpole of the Bailey series). I've read it 3 times and watched the miniseries on youtube once. Just so smart and funny and poignant. Somehow that book really speaks to me.

I've reread several of my favorite Barbara Pym novels, including Quartet in Autumn, The Sweet Dove Died and A Glass of Blessings.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. Got so much more out of it than the first time.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood. Loved it even more the second time.

For light reading, A Fatal Inversion by British thriller writer Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine. I've also re-read a few of her Inspector Wexford mysteries.

I'm really looking forward to rereading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) and Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides) and The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai).

Dancer from the dance

Looking for Mr goodbar

Faggots

As I age it resonates more and more.

Dracula

The Confederacy Of Dunces

Crime And Punishment

Hard Times

Jude The Obscure

Silas Marner

The Red And The Black

Emma

Howards End

Confederacy of Dunces

Rebecca and Gone with the Wind, I cheat and listen to the audiobooks. Really like both narrators.

I Claudius & Claudius the God- Robert Graves

Centennial- James Michener

East of Eden- John Steinbeck

The Stand and Needful Things- Stephen King

In Broad Daylight- Harry MacLean

The entire Nero Wolfe series- Rex Stout

Lord of the Rings Trilogy

A Death in the Family by James Agee

Lait & Mortimer USA Confidential

I probably read Jurassic Park at least ten times. I make no claims about it being a great novel in a literary sense but it's one of the most well-written popular novels I've come across.

Another dinosaur novel I've read on repeat is Raptor Red, credited to the paleontologist Robert T. Bakker (but has to have been ghostwritten by a professional fiction writer imo) is written from the point of view of a young female velociraptor. Unlike JP it's quite cheerful and nothing really bad happens.

Great Expectations. Custom of the Country. Genius (Patrick Dennis.). EF Benson's Lucia novels. In Cold Blood. Dancer From the Dance.

Not a novel but Gumbo Yaya

Great Expectations

Circe

Invisible Cities

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Jacob's Room

The Vintner's Luck, Bleak House, Wide Sargasso Sea

Dancer from the Dance

The World According to Garp by John Irving.

"A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole, at least 25 times. It's been a long time, but I've also read "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee at least a dozen times. I'm next going to tackle Gore Vidal's "biographies" of America -- Burr, Lincoln, 1876 -- again.

Not a novel but I have a PhD in Edie by Jean Stein.

Lightweight, but last winter I felt the need to laugh more and I picked up Joe Keenan’s Blue Heaven and Putting On The Ritz for a repeat read. Still hilarious!

And the characters of Peter and Elsa Champion in the latter are very obviously based on Trump circa the early 90s.

"The Persian Boy" by Mary Renault

"Maurice" by E.M. Forster

Mary!

The weird thing about being an English professor is I wind up having to re-read so many of the classics for teaching that my friends in other jobs read more widely than I do.

OP I have read many books over and over- Gatsby being one. But I want to say that reading "Frankenstein" as a gay allegory is just off the mark for me. If you are gay and reading a book in which nothing- absolutely nothing - is about being gay then such a projection shows that you need to see things in books for your own insecurity. You are not identifying with the monster- you are looking for a book that speak to the monster within you. There are plenty of books, classics, that you could turn to. Stop putting modern ideas into books that would never have been written in that manner.

I'm nearly finished reading Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet for probably the sixth time since the '80s. I get more out of it and am more astounded by the novels' architecture every time I read them. Next, of course, I'll watch the TV adaptation, The Jewel in the Crown, a master class in how to adapt literature to the screen.

Other frequent rereads: At Swim, Two Boys (Jamie O'Neill), Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob deZoet (David Mitchell), Persuasion, Happy All the Time and Goodbye Without Leaving (both Laurie Colwin), The Uncommon Reader (Alan Bennett), Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (Hilary Mantel), The Hare With Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles). I could go on. Sometimes I think I would be perfectly happy just rereading books I love, but then I wouldn't discover new books to love (The Bee Sting by Paul Murray).

Several of James Baldwin’s novels (Another Country, If Beale Street Could Talk, Just Above my Head), On the Beach by Nevil Shute, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Evergreen by Belva Plain, Queenie by Michael Korda.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Two Mrs. Greenvilles and A Christmas Carol to name a few.

[quote]Not a novel but Gumbo Yaya

R45, if I'm at a loss with what to do with the foot of a frizzly chicken, can I call you?

Anthony Powell's series, "A Dance to the Music of Time"

Most of Evelyn Waugh's novels

And then, having giving OP a good angry scolding, r55 felt much better about himself.

R55 OP is not off the mark. From the article linked below:

[QUOTE] There is something about Frankenstein’s creation – and, I think, about monsters in general – that speaks deeply to the queer community. It’s in that feeling of being unnatural, unattractive, unlovable; it’s about being abandoned by your creator, shunned by society; it’s about the unspeakable sorrow and rage that festers in one’s heart at this kind of treatment. I see it, too, in the monster’s terrible loneliness and desire for partnership; “Shall each man,” he says, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone? I had feelings of affection, and they were requited by detestation and scorn.”

Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy. Beautiful. I read it every 4-5 years.

I’ve read Rules of Attraction and The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis more than once.

Also, The Secret History and The Little Friend by Donna Tartt a few times. I’ve still only read The Goldfinch by her once, even though I liked it.

I reread To Kill a Mockingbird every few years.

I’ve read the trashy gay novel Panthers in the Skins of Men multiple times.

"My Pet Goat."

Many Lots of Dickens, Atwood, James, Austen.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

1984, Brave New World.

The Deptford Trilogy

Many others I read in adolescence or early adulthood if only to get a more mature perspective. That can be a double-edged sword though. Novels I enjoyed then can go either way. My early taste in science fiction and fantasy seems ridiculous as I get older.

I wonder what I will reread in twenty years, if I'm still here.

I plan on rereading Timothy Findlay's novels soon.

OP you might find this article about Frankenstein and its author interesting. You, too, R55 .

^^^^ Here's the link (below), OP and R55 .

Did it work R30?

R3, you will laugh but I know I’ve read one of those books. I searched for years in a YA book forum trying to remember the name. It wasn’t until I saw a cover posted that it clicked.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

I enjoyed a lot of John Irving.

Haven't read him twice though. Should I?

Another I read multiple times was an old paperback of John Cheever's short stories. My father kept it on a small bookshelf in the bathroom at our country/summer house .

Yes, I've read many of L.M. Montgomery's (the author of Anne of Green Gables) novels multiple times. They're a comfort read.

Galsworthy

Most William Gibson and Neal Steph enson novels, the Mallory mystery novels, Alan Furst's spy novels

Far too many to list. Far too many to count; in fact, far too many to remember.

BTW, R14, Feast of All Saints is one of them. IMHO, that's her best book.

Grad school killed me for reading. Fifteen to twenty books a week takes all the pleasure out of reading, especially when the books are so dense I would have to read a sentence out loud three or four times to make sure I actually understood it before moving on to the next one. Before I moved to FL, I threw all those books away -- and good riddance to them.

No one will ever make me believe that mine was an easy major.

The Great American Novel by Philip Roth The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis

I’ve read The Witching Hour by Anne Rice 2 or 3 times and always thought it would make a good TV series.

The series that’s currently airing…is not good.

weet reads: Gatsby Dracula Frankenstein One with the Wind To Kill A Mockingbird The Once and Future King The Fountainhead The Group The World According to Garr Mrs. Dalloway Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The Confederacy of Dunces

The Philosopher's Stone by Colin Wilson. I think I read it 5 times over the years. And Stephen King's It, at least 3 times.

Anything by Mordecai Richler

Cocksure

Confederacy of Dunces. Strangely, I was considering reading it a 3rd (4th?) time not 20 minutes ago. It’s right out of DL:

Ignatius happens upon women showing their art at a church:

“Ignatius lumbered over to the picket fence, abandoning the hopeless cause espoused by the wagon, and viewed the oil paintings and pastels and watercolors strung there. Although the style of each varied in crudity, the subjects of the paintings were relatively similar: camellias floating in bowls of water, azaleas tortured into ambitious flower arrangements, magnolias that looked like white windmills.

Ignatius scrutinized the offerings furiously for a while all by himself, for the ladies had stepped back from the fence and had formed what looked like a protective little grouping. The wagon, too, stood forlorn on the flagstones, several feet from the newest member of the art guild.

"Oh, my God!" Ignatius bellowed after he had promenaded up and down along the fence. "How dare you present such abortions to the public."

"Please move along, sir," a bold lady said.

"Magnolias don't look like that," Ignatius said, thrusting his cutlass at the offending pastel magnolia. "You ladies need a course in botany. And perhaps geometry, too."

"You don't have to look at our work," an offended voice said from the group, the voice of the lady who had drown the magnolia in question.

"Yes, I do!" Ignatius screamed. "You ladies need a critic with some taste and decency. Good heavens! Which one of you did this camellia? Speak up. The water in this bowl looks like motor oil…

"Had you 'artists' had a part in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, it would have ended up looking like a particularly vulgar train terminal," Ignatius snorted.

Rules of Attraction dozens of times when I was younger. It was basically an enhanced chronicle of my college experience.

I read The Master and Margareta about once a year. Even after 30+ times, I discover something new each time.

Shōgun beckons every few years, too.

That makes me want to reread it, R82!

A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

Most of Agatha Christie’s work multiple times since childhood. Murder of Roger Ackroyd and And Then There Were None stand out.

The original Tales of the City has been a comfort blanket since 1990.

Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine - her fiendish plots warrant repeat readings.

PD James - another female “crime Baroness” and longtime friend of Rendell. Her cerebral detective Adam Dalgliesh among her interesting works.

Persuasion and other Austen, but Persuasion is my favorite Jane Eyre David Copperfield Middlemarch Wuthering Heights The Age of Grief

Never Let Me Go, The Wings of the Dove, A Passage to India, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Mrs. Dalloway, many from childhood—Harriet the Spy and The LongSecret, The Saturdays, Charlotte’s Web, A Wrinkle in Time, The Secret Garden, The Jungle Books, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, The Persian Chronicled, At the Back of the North Wind, Great Expectations….

Oh, and Valley of the Dolls, if we’re being honest.

Oh, shoot. Forgot about double spaces

Persuasion

Middlemarch

Jane Eyre

Wuthering Heights

David Copperfield

The Age of Grief

R87, I LOVE The Saturdays!!! I love the whole Melendy series, but Saturdays might be my favorite

And yes, Narnia, too, and Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret

And The Secret Garden.

I commend your taste.

Another Elizabeth Enright fan here, too. I bought vintage hardcovers of all four of the Melendy books and both Gone Away Lake books. They're all old library books from the 50s and 60s and they have that great old book smell.

I’ve read House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski many times. It’s a tough novel to digest in one reading because there are multiple plot lines going on in the page margins, a printout of a documentary and other creepy happenings. It’s a terrific book and very unsettling. I gave it to my niece to read and she gave it right back to me. She didn’t want it in her house.