Sorry, I’ll read that again

A piece in the Observer a few weeks ago had prompted me to muse about rereading, what we come back to and why.  I lost interest, but a friend has just reminded me of one.*  I said I’d come up with my top ten.  (I’m good at self-imposed challenges.)

To deal with the ‘why’ first, some rules are needed.  (I’m good at self-imposed rules.)  Rereading from desperation because there’s nothing new to hand doesn’t count, except when it does.**  Comfort or nostalgia are insufficient motives – for example, I will never read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ again, because though it may have been a comfort blanket in the past I now recognise that, basically, it’s crap.  And some books are just plain worn out.  I’ll never read ‘Catch-22’ again.  And big fat multi-volume sagas are not allowed, just because I say so.  So no ‘Dance to the Music of Time’, or Patrick O’Brian, or Harry Potter (hah, gotcha!).

No, the ‘why’ has to be caught in that one ineluctable word: quality.

So here we go.

·         ‘The Outsider’, by Albert Camus.

·         ‘The Great Gatsby’, by F Scott Fitzgerald.

·         ‘The Tin Roof Blowdown’, by James Lee Burke.

·         ‘The Third Policeman’, by Flann O’Brien.

·         ‘Vilette’, by Charlotte Brontë.

·         ‘The High Window’, by Raymond Chandler.

·         ‘Good as Gold’, by Joseph Heller.      

·         ‘The Code of the Woosters’, by P. G. Wodehouse.

·         ‘?’, by ?

·         ‘?’, by ?

 

Perceptive as you are, you’ll have noticed two things (apart from how boring and narrowly read I am – some of those Observateurs were doing Aristotle and Thomas Mann and stuff like that): they’re not ordered; and there are two empty slots.  Those are for you to fill, with a book that you reread but I’ve probably read once at most.  You’ll have to apply some guesswork there, of course.  And obviously I can’t rank them until I have all ten.

 * It’s on the list, but I’m not telling. 

** That’s a snitch from another one on the list, by the way.