...but what about the books?

[ragboy]

Here's the shortlist of books I keep going back to:

• Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian - Absolutely the best book about the worst in human nature, ever. And you'll probably not find a more beautifully written book.
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude- Like Blood Meridian, this book was so beautifully written (translated...I guess) that it gives me physical pain to read it. The first time I read it, I finished reading about 5 minutes before Desert Shield became Desert Storm and bullets started flying... A rather prophetic closing sentence in that situation:
  
  

  . . for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

• Alexandre Dumas The Three Musketeers - Definitive blockbuster adventure story with such a damn dark ending. I get chills every time I finish it. The group's friendship, I think, carries the story through its thousands and thousands of pages (with all the follow-ons... Twenty Years After, etc)
• Frank Herbert Dune - This book was so perfect to me that I didn't even try to read any of the follow-ups. I was just afraid that it would wreck the whole mental state.
• Lord of the Rings - Like others here, I pick it back up every couple of years.
  Edit...
• James Clavell Shogun - Forgot this one. It's a guilty pleasure and probably looks weird up against all this 'literature.' Very immersive book. Probably one of the best 'normal guy in an alien environment' books I've read. I've read about four copies of this book into pieces and finally found a hard cover edition. My wife never understood why I disappeared from family life for a week while I was reading this...now she's reading it and I haven't seen her for a while...

There are others, like Conan stories, Lankhmar novels, etc. that I pick back up from time to time, but never for the same reasons as the above books.

 

[Berandor]

I rarely reread books, even though I read a lot. When I think about reading a book, I'd rather try out a new one than read one I know because I believe there are too many good/great books out there without me reading them more than once.

I'll think about books that influenced me, though.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Lord of the Rings blah blah blah. Moving on...

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand). Politics aside, this is a great story. Each time I re-read it, I get something new out of it.

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald). All those struggling authors out there can put down their pens, because this is the great American novel. Compelling characters, strong plot, beautiful language -- this book can and has moved me to tears.

Do Shakespeare plays count as books? I have read Hamlet and Romeo & Juliet many, many times.

 

[Kanegrundar]

I love books more than movies as well. Here's my list of favorite books/book series:

Lord of the Rings

Shadow War series by Chris Claremont and George Lucas

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Beowulf

Several different versions of the King Arthur legends

Greek Mythology

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Kane

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Books that I really loved, enough to read again.

1. The Robots Series from Issac Asimov. (Caves of Steel, The Nakes Sun, Robots & Empire)
2. The original Foundation Trilogy by Asimov
3. The Dark Tower Series By Stephen King (getting ready to finish the last two books after re-reading the first four and finally getting to Wolves Of the Calla)
4. Various King Books(Salems Lot, The Stand, It, The Shining, & The Tommyknockers)
5. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
6. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7. The Lord Of The Rings - by that one guy
8. The two Thomas Covenant trilogies - Stephen R Donaldson
9. The first three Black Company novels - Glenn Cook
10. Dune, Dune Messiah, & Children of Dune - Frank Herbert
11. The Harry Potter series by that very rich English lass.
12. Shadowlands - Peter Straub
13. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep - Philip Dick
14. The Demolished Man -

I'm forgetting a ton of great novels, I'll look at my book cases later and say, "Why didn't I think of that one?"

 

[MonsterMash]

What have I re-read:
Patrick O'Brien's Aubery and Maturin series of novels
The Iliad
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
R.E. Howard's Conan stories
Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar stories
H.P. Lovecraft

 

[sniffles]

Let's see;
I'm not sure how many times I've re-read LOTR. That also includes "The Silmarillion". But it isn't the only one. I've also read Gene Wolfe's "Urth of the New Sun" quartet at least 3 times. Same for Michael Scott Rohan's "Winter of the World" trilogy, and Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books. Thomas Harris's "Red Dragon" is another multi-read fave. And all of the Sherlock Holmes short stories. I've read all of the Harry Potter books more than once.

Just so I don't sound like a complete pop-culture fantasy geek, I've also reread "The Iliad" a couple of times, and "How Green Was My Valley", and several of Shakespeare's plays (notably Macbeth - and no, I wasn't just reading them for school!), and John Steinbeck's "Sweet Thursday" and "Cannery Row", and James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" and "Random Harvest".

And when I was a kid I read "My Friend Flicka" and "Thunderhead" over and over.

As a matter of fact, if I enjoy a book I will always read it again. There are few books I don't read more than once. If I don't like it enough to read it again, I probably won't finish it in the first place.

 

[nothing to see here]

There have been a lot of threads recently about what kinds of movies need to be seen, how often, and suchlike, but far fewer about books.

Being a bibliovore, I thought I'd start one.

What books have been important to you in your life? What books have tempted you back for that second, third, fourth, or even greater read?

In other words, which books really feed you?

I'll place my own answers in after I see a few responses.

Don't reread a lot of fiction in it's entirety...to me the appeal is lost when you know what's exactly going to happen.

Nonfiction, however, I re-read all the time. I find that once you finish reading a book, you gain a perspective that allows you to get more out of the beginning.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Books I have re-read:

The Belgariad - several times.
Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournell - The book that first got me into science fiction
Red Storm Rising

Books that really moved me (and I really should read again):
Dune (but I could never get past the first book)
The Way of the Pilgrim by Gordon R. Dickson
Cuckoo's Egg by C.J. Cherryh
1984

 

[kolvar]

Probably the Book with the most influence on my role-playing was the Silmarillion (which I read after the hobbit and before LotR (constantly wondering, where the heck the shire was - up to the last part of the book)).
All in all, I would guess the bible had the greatest influence on my life, even before I read it. (that is: I am living in a society based on christian values ... or is that to far fetched???). After I read it, I knew, that there are parts of it, that are rather interesting and other parts, that are enormously boring.
A third book would probably an "old" Book with Heroe-Legends (Nibelungen, Dietrich von Bern, Wolfdietrich, Beowulf, Weiland etc.) which opened my mind to the fantastic and finally led to me studiyng Medieval German Language and History.
Which Book I would recommend would be Arno Schmidts "Die Gelehrtenrepublik" (sorry, don't know the english name).