Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl! This week, we’re talking about books that we could re-read again and again. I LOVE a good re-read, so here are books that have really held up for me the second (and third, and fourth, etc) time through.
Lolita: There’s so much to this novel that every time I read it I notice a new brilliant bit of wordplay or layer to the story. If you’ve let its subject matter keep you away, please don’t. It’s really an amazing book.
The Secret History: I first read this book in my AP English class my senior year of high school and though I’ve long since known how it all turns out, it sucks me in all over again every time I pick it up.
A Game of Thrones (series): This is cheating (there’s another cheat down the list), but I re-read one of these books every year over the holidays and they’re so dense and rich and the amount of foreshadowing is just incredible.
The Virgin Suicides: I first read this book at least 15 years ago and re-read it just late last year for my book club and countless times in between and it never fails to give me that very real, very powerful feeling of place that it did on the first time through.
Gone Girl: This is the book on this list I’ve re-read the least often, only twice. But Flynn’s sharp-as-nails evisceration of the ways the world is bullshit to women is so insightful and hard-hitting that it’s just as good when you come back to it.
In Cold Blood: Truman Capote’s storytelling skills are really top-notch, which is why the pleasure of reading along as he tells the tale of the men who murdered the Clutter family doesn’t diminish over time.
A Wrinkle In Time: I read this whole series over and over again as a young teen, but the first one most of all. For such a slim volume, L’Engle really packs it full of not just plot, but themes that resonate for kids and adults too.
Harry Potter (series): My second cheat, because picking just one of these books feels impossible. It’s really all together, as the story of Harry (and Ron and Hermione), that they’re best and so, so, re-readable.
1984: My sister still has the copy I got when I was like 12 on her bookshelf and it is a book I constantly reference and go back to because it is so prescient and smart.
Bridget Jones’ Diary: Pretty much all of these are serious books, so I needed to throw in something funny. This is one of those books that literally makes you laugh out loud reading it and its cleverness is undiminished over time.