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Your most-read novel

Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones were perfect casting! He originally wrote it in the early 70s as a screen play, and wanted John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda in it, not sure which roles they would have played, and much as I love a Wayne Western, not sure it would have worked

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonesome_dove

I know mate - when I like something, I devour every single detail I can find out about it ;)
 
The House of the Spirits about 8 times, but not for many years.

I pick up Bryson when I don't have anything new to read, too. Milligan's war memoirs I've read quite a few times too.
 
Hmm, probably Dune, The Diamond Age and, like Dub, Life After God...altho I haven't been back to that for a few years now, being a somewhat happier person than I was a few years ago!

Also...Bluffers Guide to the Quantum Universe, Chaos and The Origin Of Species are pretty well thumbed non-fiction...
 
I was a bit obsessive when i did English A Level, read Wuthering Heights 6 times, Hard Times, 4 times, and Great Expectations 4 times

Ooh, yes, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations for me too, which is odd cos I find the rest of Bronte and Dickens' stuff a touch dull and predictable, but Wuthering Heights. Sigh! One Yorkshire holiday I went up to the cottage that is supposed to be Wuthering Heights and ran around singing "It's me, it's Cathy I've come hoooommmeee" etc with a mate.

I also took the best photo I've even taken of Wuthering Heights all windswept and bleak an' that :cool:
 
Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee :o
For those I loved - Martin Gray

Read them both lots of times, not sure which the most.
 
Blimey. Er...

I've read "A Prayer for Owen Meany" and "The Hotel New Hampshire" by John Irving about half a dozen times each, Stephen Donaldson's two "Thomas Covenant" trilogies about an equal number of times and "Dracula" at least once every couple of years since the mid 1970s.

Plus there are literally hundreds of other books that I've read 2 or 3 times.
 
Milligan's war memoirs I've read quite a few times too.

How could I forget? Oh yeah, novels...

I do tend to re-read at least one of his war memoirs every six or seven months. Sad and funny and so much more human than any other history of the second world war.
 
Ooh, yes, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations for me too, which is odd cos I find the rest of Bronte and Dickens' stuff a touch dull and predictable, but Wuthering Heights. Sigh! One Yorkshire holiday I went up to the cottage that is supposed to be Wuthering Heights and ran around singing "It's me, it's Cathy I've come hoooommmeee" etc with a mate.

I also took the best photo I've even taken of Wuthering Heights all windswept and bleak an' that :cool:

:cool:

who would win in a fight, Pip or Heathcliffe ?
 
Ooh, yes, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations for me too, which is odd cos I find the rest of Bronte and Dickens' stuff a touch dull and predictable, but Wuthering Heights. Sigh! One Yorkshire holiday I went up to the cottage that is supposed to be Wuthering Heights and ran around singing "It's me, it's Cathy I've come hoooommmeee" etc with a mate.

I also took the best photo I've even taken of Wuthering Heights all windswept and bleak an' that :cool:

That's because Emily was the only decent writer in the family. Her sisters produced shite
 
Blimey. Er...

I've read "A Prayer for Owen Meany"

I've read The World According to Garp a couple of times and I loved A Prayer for Owen Meany but it's never occurred to me to actually read it again, because I know the ending now. I don't suppose it matters really....
 
Good question - Heathcliffe was a massive, mean, dog killing brute of a bad, but Pip had plenty of passion that could be channelled into rage I reckon.

Hmm...:hmm:

pip was good at boxing, he put that herbert pocket down big style :cool:
 
I've read The World According to Garp a couple of times and I loved A Prayer for Owen Meany but it's never occurred to me to actually read it again, because I know the ending now. I don't suppose it matters really....

Oh do, there's lots of joy to be had 2nd and 3rd time round too.

It does have the best ending ever though, doesn't it?
 
I have, but not many. Dostoevsky only, pretty much. One can only read around 10,000 books in a single lifetime, and that's not many books. So life's too short to repeat them.

I'd say life's too short not to savour and revisit the things you love :)
 
Mr Tickle is beautifully written. And an ending filled with pathos that you really don't see coming.





;)
Indeed. You want to be Mr Tickle. You imagine yourself as him and the fun you would have with those long wavy arms. And then... you are suddenly forced to confront yourself and examine how it was that you could have ever wanted to be Mr Tickle. How foolish you feel at the end of the book, yet you are that little bit wiser than you were at the start.
 
I tend to read a book once in its entirety, then go back and revisit particular passages from time to time. I'm not sure i've read anything more than once since I was a kid and I read The Haunting by Margaret Mahy about six times.
 
I can't wait to read Before I Forget by Andre Brink again, while was reading it I had to try ery hard not to ge a penciland underline passages. same with The Golden Notebook. That wasn't the question though was it....
 
I can't wait to read Before I Forget by Andre Brink again, while was reading it I had to try ery hard not to ge a penciland underline passages. same with The Golden Notebook. That wasn't the question though was it....
The Golden Notebook is a good example of a book with passages in that I could read again and again, but that I will never read again cover-to-cover. The last 100 or so pages are a bit of a meandering mess tbh. She clearly didn't know how to end it.

There are very few novels I've read that I will ever reread, I think. The odd short one – I've read Cat's Cradle three or four times – but probably no longer ones at all.
 
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