Books that I have read more than twice.

[Ian Fortytwo]

I'll put my number one first and then in order. Of course this does not include books outside of the genre, which I might include later in the thread if anyone is interested.
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. My favourite and most read, well over forty times.
Alice Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.
2001, by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation.), by Isaac Asimov.
The Cornelius Quartet (The Final Programme; A Cure For Cancer; The English Assassin; The Condition of Muzak.), Michael Moorcock.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A trilogy in five parts (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Mostly Harmless.), by Douglas Adams.
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Dragons of Winter Night.
Dragons of Spring Dawning.
Dragons of Summer Flame.
All by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
The Story of Kullervo, by J. R. R. Tolkien. This last one is a beautiful but tragic story.

If anyone else wants to join in with their multi-read books, then by all means do. It can be an enjoyable experience.

 

[Anthoney]

I read a lot of books twice but few more than twice. The Hobbit and the LotR books 4 or 5 times each. I'm not sure if I read them 2 or 3 times before finishing high school.

The first 6 books in the Amber series by Zelazny 4 times each.

I just did a third read on 1632 and 1633 by Eric Flint.

The Stand by Stephen King 3 times if you count the extra long edition with the normal one.

The Book of Swords trilogy by Fred Saberhagen. 3 times.

The Wheel of Time books. After I read the first few I would reread the whole series as each new book came out. The first few I've read 7 times, The rest work their way down until the last book which I've only read twice. It's my favorite of the series and one of my all time favorites so I will read it again.

 

[Al Jackson]

View attachment 49781

I'll put my number one first and then in order. Of course this does not include books outside of the genre, which I might include later in the thread if anyone is interested.
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. My favourite and most read, well over forty times.
Alice Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.
2001, by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation.), by Isaac Asimov.
The Cornelius Quartet (The Final Programme; A Cure For Cancer; The English Assassin; The Condition of Muzak.), Michael Moorcock.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A trilogy in five parts (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Mostly Harmless.), by Douglas Adams.
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Dragons of Winter Night.
Dragons of Spring Dawning.
Dragons of Summer Flame.
All by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
The Story of Kullervo, by J. R. R. Tolkien. This last one is a beautiful but tragic story.

If anyone else wants to join in with their multi-read books, then by all means do. It can be an enjoyable experience.

Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke
The Stars My Destination, Bester (my favorite re-read, maybe 10 or 15 times since 1956)
Star Ship Troopers and Double Star , Heinlein (these are from before 1960 before Heinlein went funny in the heard, in fact almost anything he wrote before 1960 is worth reading again.)
Cities in Flight , Blish
The Space Merchants and Gladiator at Law by Fred Pohl and C M Kornbluth
More Than Human by Ted Sturgeon (one the best unjustly unknown SF novels of all time)
Lest Darkness Fall , L. Sprague de Camp ( I know of no other time travel story like this).
Almost all of Cordwainer Smith's stories about The Instrumentality (the most unique SF ever written)

 

[HareBrain]

Not many. The Hobbit, LOTR and The Silmarillion, various Narnia books, all of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, and Alan Garner's The Owl Service. I think that really is about it in genre.

 

[Extollager]

View attachment 49781

I'll put my number one first and then in order. Of course this does not include books outside of the genre, which I might include later in the thread if anyone is interested.
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien. My favourite and most read, well over forty times.
Alice Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell.
2001, by Arthur C. Clarke.
The Foundation Trilogy (Foundation; Foundation and Empire; Second Foundation.), by Isaac Asimov.
The Cornelius Quartet (The Final Programme; A Cure For Cancer; The English Assassin; The Condition of Muzak.), Michael Moorcock.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. A trilogy in five parts (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Mostly Harmless.), by Douglas Adams.
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin.
The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
Dragons of Winter Night.
Dragons of Spring Dawning.
Dragons of Summer Flame.
All by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
The Story of Kullervo, by J. R. R. Tolkien. This last one is a beautiful but tragic story.

If anyone else wants to join in with their multi-read books, then by all means do. It can be an enjoyable experience.

There's a similar thread here:

Books You've Reread the Most Times

However, yours focuses on genre works, where the earlier thread invited responses about books whether genre or not, and asked that responders -- to start with -- stick to books that they have read at least four times. That factor probably restricted the number of responses to the thread.

 

[J.D. Robinson]

I can’t usually read a book more than once, even (and maybe especially) if I’ve loved it. I kinda just want to lock it away and never open it again. However, as a writer I have been known to dip back into a read book to see how certain mechanics were set up and paid off. So I’ll make the occasional exception for craft.

 

[SPoots]

The entire Discworld series by Terry Pratchett.
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
The Farthest Away Mountain by Lynne Reid Banks
The Encyclopaedia of Mythology
The Hobbit by J R R Tolkein

There are some others but I am away from my bookshelves and can't check.

 

[AnyaKimlin]

I'll happily read a book three, four or five times. The ones I have read more than twice are really numerous. My fantasy favourites that I return to many times:

Mist Over Pendle by Robert Neil (I bought it in 1989 and I must have read that at least 90 times as I read it when I am down, miserable and need to truly escape. It's an historical with a magical realism/fantasy tinge).

Waters and the Wild by Jo Zebedee (Only read it about 3 times but not had it as long as Mist Over Pendle. I will be returning to it soon)

Otherwise my comfort books are Agatha Christie, Cadfael and Kathy Reichs.

Lesser known authors local to the NE Scotland: Meg Woodward and Jane Yeadon. These two ladies are amazing writers and have me spell bound. The characters (Jane's are historical) in the books are so alive and I love spending time with them.

Also quite like my own stuff

 

[OHB]

I don't think I've ever read a book more than once. There are so many books that I want to read and don't have time to that the idea of spending time re-reading something seems like a distant dream I won't reach until I'm retired.

 

[Extollager]

In my experience, there are books that seem to have little to offer other than the interest of finding out what happens next. Those might be worth just one reading, unless enough time passes and the memory fades to the extent that one can read the book almost as a new book, or as a book one read a long time ago & wants to reread largely for that reason.

Within the past few years, I reread Lester del Rey's Siege Perilous after having read it almost 50 years earlier. It wasn't very good, but it was interesting to read something I was pretty sure I'd read as a kid. I tried to reread del Rey's Day of the Giants, but it just wasn't holding my interest. When I reread Keith Laumer's novelization of the TV series The Invaders, it was fun to come across a little that, it seems, I had remembered for many, many years. For example, I remembered that the bad guy's name was Dorn.

But there are a lot of books that, it seems to me, have much to offer after the demands of that initial craving to find out what happens have been satisfied. I suppose that most of the greatest pleasures I've had from reading have come through rereading.

 

[Brian G Turner]

There are very few books I've read more than once, and when I have it's usually because it's been a couple of decades since my first read and I can't remember much of the story - The Hobbit, Dune, Dragonlance, and David Gemmell's Legend all fall into that category.

However, there are a lot of books I plan to read again - not least Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and Robert Fabbri's Vespasian series - it's just getting around to them.

 

[Al Jackson]

If I did not limit it to SF , I have read Charles Portis's True Grit many times.
It is the most remarkable western I know of.

 

[M. Robert Gibson]

On Topic:
- The Hobbit
- Lord of the Rings
- The Silmarillion
- Dracula
- Gulliver's Travels
- Monkey

Off Topic:
- Clockwork Orange
- All Ian Fleming's James Bonds

Those are the ones I distinctly remember re-reading, but there may be others my ageing mind cannot recollect.

 

[thaddeus6th]

I used to re-read books quite a lot. Less so recently.

Outlaws of the Marsh
Three Kingdoms
Byzantium (three volumes), by John Julius Norwich
The Silmarillion
Dragon Wing
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England/Elizabethan England/Restoration Britain
The Iliad
The Prince

I'm sure there are more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. A nice thing about re-reading history is that you can get more out of the same book if you know more about the context in which it the events occur.

 

[Mouse]

I don't know if these count as genre but I've seen them mentioned on the forums a few times. The only books I've ever reread are the Redwall books by Brian Jacques and the Duncton books by William Horwood. And it's the William Horwood ones I've reread more than any other.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Waters and the Wild by Jo Zebedee (Only read it about 3 times but not had it as long as Mist Over Pendle. I will be returning to it soon)
Also quite like my own stuff

As do I (like your stuff). Shows we both have excellent taste. (And, thank you - nice to know Waters is loved)

I reread so much stuff, including (these are the most-re-read I can think of)

Vorkosigan series (Memory is itching at me to go and read again)
Time Traveller's Wife
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Jodi Taylor's St Mary's books (must go and have a reread)
The Martian
A Certain Book by a Certain Author which I won't name because I won't promote her work
Winnie the Pooh'
Narnia
The Snow Goose
Rachel's Holiday, Marian Keyes (so funny, and the end always makes me cry horribly)
The Great Gatsby
Wuthering Heights
The Outsiders, SE Hinton

Loads of poems and plays

 

[AnyaKimlin]

As do I (like your stuff). Shows we both have excellent taste. (And, thank you - nice to know Waters is loved)

Yeah I think I need to find a way to allow people to actually read it

And Waters and the Wild is very much loved and enjoyed. It's a book that can be read in multiple ways. It also has a strong style and voice which I find modern publishing is reducing in books. It's why I love Meg Woodward's books, they have a strong sense of identity and you would never pick out the author in a room after reading them.

 

[elvet]

I have read many books more than once. I am in the habit of rereading the first books of a series when the later ones come out, mostly to refresh my memory of the story and get back into the world. Consequently, the first books of a series get many rereads, depending on the subsequent releases. Examples would be ASoIaF, The Sun Sword, House War, Malazan Book of the Fallen, Stormlight Archive, First Law, Expanse, etc.
Then there are some books that are just so dense with story, that they are always a joy to read and give something new each time I read them. The Silmarillion/Hobbit/LotR are like that, and I always read them together. So are the the Malazan books, The Culture, and Robin Hobbs Fitz’ books. So many more, I can’t think of them all.

 

[Laura R Hepworth]

I've reread a lot of books. Not sure if I can remember them all, but here are at least some of them.

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
The Space Trilogy - C.S. Lewis
Song of the Lioness Quartet - Tamora Pierce
The Immortals Quartet - Tamora Pierce
Circle of Magic Quartet - Tamora Pierce
More Star Trek Original Series books than I dare list because it would go on forever.

 

[biodroid]

Slow reader here, but I have read Lightning by Dean Koontz twice and Insomnia by Stephen King twice. Not sure why maybe I couldnt find anything else at the time.