My Ten Most Reread Books
(If I’ve listened to an album only once, that album is, essentially, a failure. The same isn’t true of books. There are books I love, including a few of my very favorites, that I’ve read only once and might never read again—for instance War and Peace. Even The Baron in the Trees, which is probably my favorite novel, I’ve read only three times, which is one too few to make this list. But if repeatability isn’t an essential literary virtue, it is a literary virtue. Here, then, are the ten books with the greatest measure of that virtue, arranged approximately in order of how many times I’ve read them from beginning to end. I’ve restricted myself to books I’ve returned to regularly as an adult, leaving out those books I read over and over again as a kid but have rarely read since. What nearly all these books have in common is brevity, with the notable exception of my number ten, which I read once a year when I was in college.)
Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos by John Berger
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker
Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls
A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin
— February 18, 2021