Books I Have Known, Read and Re-Read.

Ooh err, missus!
I honestly can't imagine a film. I'm not sure I want to!

MissA his complaint was definitely well portrayed,for the life if me though cant remember who was in it

This is a great book. Just saw it on the bookshelf today - time to read again

I enjoy re-reading the Miss Read books. Not at all taxing, but easy to pick up and put down. I found them just the ticket during lockdown.
I re-read the Rosamund Pilcher books “September” and “Winter Solstice” quite regularly, too - the latter in the run up to Christmas.

Very rarely re read books, at least not on purpose, but many times I get a little way into a book and think "this seems awfully familiar" !!

Several times over many years have I read and reread Little Women and its sequels.
I`ve also re read Alaska, by James A. Michenor. It`s quite a thick book, but it tells the story of Alaska`s development from the days of the mammoth until the present day. It`s a fascinating book.

Cutting for stone. Loved it so much I read it twice.

Oh how could I have forgotten that vital book of my pony mad childhood Black Beauty by Anna Sewell!

so many lovely memories of books people have mentioned. Read Jane Eyre when I was about 10 in bed and not supposed to be , and was frightened by the mad woman and fire etc. Love Jane Austin, Anthony Trollope - not Joanna , but early classics I liked as a child were Children of the New Forest, and a very old book called Girl of the Limberlost, written about a girl who lives in I think, the everglades or similar and has to collect butterflies to raise the money to go to school. Of course , would not approve of killing butterflies now but it was an interesting book. Was into older books borrowed from family and friends until old enough to get into the adult library. For light reading Lillian Beckwith The loud Halo and the rest of the series and Alexander McCall Smith the No 1 Ladies Dectective Agency. Girl with the Pearl Earring, but for rereads I think Pride and Prejudice is always worth turning back to.How I enjoy disliking both Mr Slope and the awful Lady de Burg. (have met one or two such ladies in my life!)

I read everything that came into the house as a teenager including everyone else's library books. I don't think I had time to reread anything.

My 'comfort' books now include all Georgette Heyer's books, 'The Sun in Splendour' by Sharon Penman, 'The Far Pavilions' and 'Shadow of the Moon' by MM Kaye, 'Notes from a Small Island' by Bill Bryson (in fact most things by Bill Bryson). And 'Wolf Hall' has joined them.

I've never been able to get on with Dickens or Trollope, or in fact a lot of the classics although I love Jane Austen but I know my taste changes so every now and again I get something from the library that I have never completed and give it another try.

I also have a load of travel books by a host of people like Pete McCarthy that I reread quite often as they can still make me chuckle.

That should read David Copperfield.

I can read all about the exploits of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves over and over again.
A book I keep returning to is Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett. It's a really good murder mystery.
Others I've re-read over the years,
Pride and Prejudice
David Cooper field
Campbell's Kingdom
The Flight of the Heron trilogy.

I forgot Middlemarch.
And Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat - surely one of the funniest ever.

downtoearth

MissA saw the film Portnoys complaint way back in the 70's

Well, I never knew these was a film made.

How on earth did they put all that filth on screen?

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - read and re-read this wonderful story 16 times and will doubtless read it again soon.

Thank you for these. A few to be added to the TBR list, but I have read most of those mentioned, and they are either old favourites or ones I don't care for.
I am a great re-reader, and I think that there are particular qualities to books that you re-read regularly. For me, it's about immersing myself in a world.
Any Jane Austen
Harry Potter
His Dark Materials
Fourth Realm Trilogy (John Twelvehawks. I am re-reading at the moment "It doesn't matter what the truth is, only what you can get people to believe")
The Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear
The Moomin books
Wilkie Collins

So many. As a child The Chalet School series. Even now I like to start at the beginning and read the series. Wind in the Willows, Arthur Ransome, Good Night Mr Tom (makes me cry) and others.
Older, I love Georgette Heyer, some Nevil Shute, Faye and Jonathan Kellerman books and Patricia Cornwell, though I’m getting rid of those now. Books by Manning Coles. My favourite rereads at the moment are by Jude Deveraux and Sarah Morgan-something gentler for relaxing.

pillars of the earth, read it at least three times

MissA saw the film Portnoys complaint way back in the 70's

Cider with Rosie is my desert island book ...who couldn't love it? The books I read again and again include The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard written about 100 years ago about a mad cap journey in Antarctica; The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson - his first and funniest book. I also love Our Bodies Ourselves Boston's Women Health Book collective; A night to Remember by Walter Lord about the Titanic; anything by Maggie O'Farrell; The Pauper's Cook Book by Jocasta Innes; The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler; Nigella Lawson's recipe books - I love her writing. Lastly, a book I have nearby always called, In the Pink - a book of poems from the show Raving Beauties and shown on the first night Channel 4 started in 1982...I have a signed copy by the wonderful Sue Jones-Davies. Oh yes, one more The Magus by John Fowles...I could go on!

Witzend

Ditto to Cider with Rosie, and the Barchester novels. Mr Slope long ago joined P&P’s Mr Collins as the two most ghastly fictional men I’ve ever ‘met’ but I think Trollope definitely takes the prize for the most wonderful physical description of someone who would make you shudder.

... seconded!

Mr Collins, ugh, inwardly quaking.

I have also read and re-read all of Dickens' novels.

The opening chapter of Bleak House, 'In Chancery' is so evocative - it's a London that still existed to some extent when I was child...

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

One of the finest descriptions of 'old' London to be found in literature.

From childhood, the usual, Mallory Towers. I loved all the Aurther Ransom books, I won Swallows and Amazons for a school prize and was hooked.

When we were about thirteen we read ‘A Kind of Loving’ by Stan Barstow, it was very grown up, about sex resulting in an unwanted pregnancy. I think it’s a good thing my dad didn’t know what it was about, or he would have marched up to the school, and demanded we read something more appropriate.
I must have stolen my school copy, so that I could reread it, and I have it still.

Adulthood, so many.
My favourite ever book is The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.

Portnoys Complaint.
A masterpiece, I think, and a joy, and unsettling.

I re-read all my Borrowers books, Enid Blyton’s mystery and school books, Chalet School, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower (I loved reading the instructions included in this for making a Japanese Doll’s house).
I still read my Agatha Christie books and I’m another who reads Gone With The Wind hoping for a different ending. I still laugh at The Diary of a Nobody.
I also never get tired of Seven in Switzerland and The Katy books and The Honour of the House. These have descriptions of boxes of goodies being opened, which I love. It’s like having Christmas all over again.

The Enid Blyton short story books.

I read them endlessly to one of "my ladies" at work.
I could put on all the voices, and not feel silly, too.

The what Katy books, too.