Stepping in the same book twice

This report inspired the Babu to compile a rough, happily biased, and highly subjective list of books that require re-reading, and books he was unable to get through a second time.

Books I Return To

1) The Iliad, Homer
It's the battle scenes. The bits about gaffing people through the jaw.
2) Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Just for the pleasure of saying 'Major Major Major Major' over and over again.
3) To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Yup. Soppy choice, but I have the masses on my side here
4) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
5) Most of Faulkner; some of Flannery O' Connor
6) Tagore's Shesher Kabita and for some reason, Rajarshi
7) Bestiary, Julio Cortazar
Whenever I want a touch of strange
8) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
This one's pure nostalgia--takes me straight back to my teenage years
9) The Leopard, Lampedusa
Yeah, yeah. It's like he's writing about my family.
10) The Mahabharata, especially in different translations
11) Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
As a reminder of what might yet be
12) A Portrait of the Artist, Dubliners, James Joyce
Joyce was an honorary Bengali, you know that?
13) Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
I reread Midnight's Children out of duty; this one out of pleasure
14) A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller and
15) A Case of Conscience, James Blish
16) A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
17) All About H Hatterr, G V Desani
Fourth reading and I still haven't figured the damn thing out
18) Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
The day I grow tired of Alice is the day I'm tired of life
19) A House for Mr Biswas, V S Naipaul
20) Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
21) Why isn't there any Shakespeare, given that I reread the plays all the time? Because we had to reread Good Will so often in school that I no longer know whether this is a choice of a reflex.
22) Instead, Pale Fire, Speak, Memory and Lolita, Nabokov
23) And Dostoevsky bar the potboilers
24) A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
For some reason, people look at you very strangely if you say this is one of the greatest books of all time


Books I couldn't read more than once:

1) The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
2) Make that "anything by Ayn Rand"
3) And ditto Ron Hubbard
4) Hey, no fair leaving off Khalil Gibran

That was fun. Now for the real list. The rules: you can't include books that you haven't finished; to qualify, a book must be something that you've read once, perhaps disliked, perhaps even enjoyed, but that you cannot bring yourself to go back to.

1) Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
2) The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Loved it at first reading. But balk like a nervous horse at the prospect of a second.
3) Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce
Once was quite enough.
4) Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
"This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty.."
Didn't live up to that promise.
5) War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Once more into the breach, my friend? I've been promising myself I will, soon, some day, for the last 12 years.
6) Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Read the book, saw the film, what more do you want from me?
7) Most of Lin Yutang
Maybe the style's dated, maybe the politics. In my old age, I think she was a waste of time from the very beginning
8) Atomised, Michel Houellebecq
You know those French novels that everyone talks about and reads and has a copy of around the house and two years later, you wonder why you bothered?
9) The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
This one's weird. I enjoyed it. I thought about it a lot. And I just can't read this--or any James--again. No idea why, but it's like walking uphill on a glass slope.
10) Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
What, go through all those footnotes again?
11) Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Frankly, m'dear, the racism hits you between the eyes the second time round
12) Shane, Jack Schaefer
Nope, I didn't want him to come back
13) The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
There should be a law banning the literary-minded from writing bad SF
14) Starship Troopers, Robert A Heinlein
I still can't believe I FINISHED the darn thing, forget reading it again
15) One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
Read this when I was 11, and have been haunted by the fear that I'll stop thinking it was brilliant if I ever reread it
16) Eucalyptus, Murray Bail
It's like the perfect one-night-stand--you don't want to come back and discover that the dude snores
17) The Chip Chip Gatherers, Shiva Naipaul
I have no idea why I read it in the first place
18) Faust, Goethe
Once you know how it ends, why bother?
19) Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust
If I had two lives, I would read this again; but it would need another life all to itself.
20) The Trotternama, I Allan Sealy
I keep browsing through this, but have never been able to start at point A and work my way across to Z after the first time
21) Clarissa, Richardson
Wouldn't even have ploughed through this thoroughly unrewarding artifact the first time round if my college hadn't employed sadists as teachers