Must Rereads

Those of us who bury ourselves in books are often unhappy creatures desperate to find consolation. We don't merely find it in fictional worlds, but also in reasons and explanations which help to order our chaotic thoughts and instincts, to loosen neurological knots, to reconcile contending passions.

At least, this is the intellectual explanation. The other, perhaps more truthful, explanation is that reading is an addiction. How many of us buy far more books than we have time for? How many of us flick through dozens of books in one evening, never settling, never content, always look for some new novelty, some new bit of knowledge? How many of us fetishise the book itself -- the paper, the foxing, the newspaper cuttings and shopping lists used as bookmarks, the cover, the leather (if we're so lucky), the inscriptions, the smell from the decades marinading in the damp houses of peculiar antiquarians?

I keep many books. Though I feel I must confess that most I keep for reasons other than the writing. I like certain editions, say, or I have fond memories of purchasing the book in some dreadfully unwelcoming bookshop. The genuine test of whether a book is worth keeping is whether or not one re-reads it. By this measure, I suspect I could cull my library to fifty books, if that (with the exception of some reference and textbooks). And I doubt this number would expand much over the rest of my life.

One often sees lists of 'Must Reads', but never 'Must Rereads'. Yet the former would provide a much more interesting and rewarding selection. It would be less vulnerable to fashion, a far more honest assessment of what books people actually find meaningful.

I'll give you my list in a moment. But I feel the need to write a quick preface. When I reflect on the books I love, I feel some guilt. There are many 'Great Books' I have read, and often found interesting, but am entirely unable to love. I see how much other people adore them, how much joy and insight they find, and my inability to understand this can almost feel as if there is a part of my soul missing. One particularly notable example is Dickens. I can see the beauty of his novels. I am attracted to their language. Yet I feel like I'm in some sort of dream where I'm trying to swim in the ocean, but for some reason I cannot penetrate the water's surface.

There are also books I adore which are not generally respected. Sometimes they are books dismissed as genre-fiction or even children's- or boy's-fiction. One example of the latter is Ivanhoe, one of my favourite stories, which even in its time was regarded as a sort of boy's adventure story, a costume drama, one of Scott's less probing works, and is now almost unread (with the exception of Tony Blair, who I believe claimed he kept it by his bedside, though that is not an endorsement I necessarily welcome). I love the story. I genuinely think it profound and full of virtue. (I will at some point write an essay about Scott, why he is of the 'great unreads', and what makes the Waverley novels so compelling.) But there is a part of me which feels guilty for loving this adventure story and being bored stiff by, say, Vanity Fair. One likes to pretend that things like literary stigma don't matter in the end, but truthfully most of us are vulnerable, at least to some extent, to a sense of intellectual inadequacy.

Anyway, off the top of my head here's my list of Must Rereads, in no particular order (and like on Desert Island Discs, it goes without saying that any Must Reread list includes the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare):

Robert Burton -- The Anatomy of Melancholy
Samuel Johnson -- Rasselas
Samuel Johnson -- Essays
Samuel Johnson -- The Vanity of Human Wishes
James Boswell -- The Life of Samuel Johnson
Walter Scott -- Waverley Novels (not yet read them all)
Walter Scott -- Journal

Daniel Defoe -- Robinson Crusoe
G.K. Chesterton -- St Francis of Assisi

G.K. Chesterton -- The Judgement of Dr. Johnson
Jerome K. Jerome -- Three Men in a Boat
Miguel de Cervantes -- Don Quixote
Eugene Vodolazkin -- Laurus
St Augustine -- Confessions
John Kennedy Toole -- A Confederacy of Dunces
Tomasi di Lampedusa -- The Leopard
Tobias Smollett -- The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
M.R. James -- Short Stories
Simon Leys -- The Halls of Uselessness
C.S. Lewis -- Out of the Silent Planet

Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World

Lewis Carroll -- Alice in Wonderland

Daniel Defoe -- A Journal of the Plague Year

Charles Ives -- Memos

Malcolm Bradbury -- The History Man

The Analects of Confucius

Walter M. Miller -- A Canticle for Leibowitz

Vikram Seth -- An Equal Music

Jorge Luis Borges -- Short Stories

(One notable book series I may have to add is the Aubrey-Maturin novels, the first of which I have just read. I feel compelled to read them all, and I suspect I will end up rereading them too.)