The Second Time Around

Michael Blowhard, over at 2 Blowhards, posits an interesting query: what books have you read more than twice? My list is below. It's fairly long, as I am a big re-reader (and was a huge re-reader as a child). Part of it is that I have a embarrassingly bad memory for plots and such - I'm rereading the Lloyd Alexander Prydain series now, a series I haven't read in probably almost twenty years, and I don't remember hardly anything of the plots. Occasionally I'll feel guilty about re-reading something (in that it's time that could be spent discovering something new), but the guilt is usually won over by the sheer pleasure I get in discovering things in the books I could never have noticed in just one read. In an attempt at full disclosure, I've put in parenthesis after each entry a number to indicate just how many times I've read a particular book. The asterisks indicate books I, in all likelihood, will read again at some point (some of these I expect to read to my children).

Stephen King
Bag of Bones (2)
Cujo (3)
Cycle of the Werewolf (2)
Danse Macabre (2)
The Dark Half (2)
The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger* (4)
The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three* (3)
The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands* (3)
The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass* (2)
The Dead Zone (2)
Dolores Claiborne* (2)
The Eyes of the Dragon* (3)
Firestarter (3)
Four Past Midnight (2)
The Green Mile* (3)
Insomnia (2)
It* (5)
The Long Walk* (3)
Misery (2)
Night Shift (2)
On Writing (2)
Pet Sematary (3)
Rage (3)
Different Seasons* (3)
The Stand* (3)
Thinner (2)
Tommyknockers (2)

J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone* (2)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets* (2)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban* (2)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire* (2)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix* (2)

Isaac Asimov
The Caves of Steel (3)
Fantastic Voyage (2)
Foundation (2)
Foundation and Empire (2)
Foundation's Edge (2)
The Naked Sun (2)
The Robots of Dawn (3)
Robots and Empire (2)
Second Foundation (2)

Robert R. McCammon
Swan Song* (3)

Edward P. Jones
The Known World* (2)

Douglas Adams
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy* (3)
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe* (3)
Life, the Universe, and Everything* (3)

Lloyd Alexander
The Book of Three* (4)
The Black Cauldron* (4)
The Castle of Lyr* (3)
Taran Wanderer* (3)
The High King* (3)

William Shakespeare
Hamlet* (3)
Romeo and Juliet (2)
Macbeth* (2)

E.B. White
Charlotte's Web* (3)

Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot* (3)

Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie (3)

Terrence McNally
Lips Together, Teeth Apart* (3)
Love! Valour! Compassion!* (4)
Master Class (2)
Corpus Christi* (2)





I also read two or three times as a child most of the Beverly Clearly Ramona books and much of Judy Blume's output, as well as many an Encyclopedia Brown entry.

Until Whenever