Printable View
Are there any books you have that you've read over and over to the point of nearly memorizing them?
I'm this way with Ender's Game. I read it atleast once a year and I feel like I could recite a good portion of it if I needed to. I haven't read Speaker for the Dead as often, but that would be probably next on the list.
What books do you pick up over and over again?
None because I remember lots of things from the first time I read it! so I rarely if ever re-read a book. Same with games. Gotta have lots more stuff for me to do or I'll just never pick it up again.
I have large portions of Memoirs of a Geisha memorized.
Bram Stoker's Dracula. I find myself quietly reciting lines from this amazing book. :(
The Cat in the Hat.
Far too many :( a lot of random novels, textbooks, wikipedia pages... practically all I do in my spare time these days is read.
I think I've read Watership Down the most of all books (not counting kids' books and such). I don't think I quite have it memorized, though.
When I was little I read a chapter book called Sam the Cat: Detective about a million times and I think I had parts of that memorized for sure.
The closest for me would probably be parts of the DragonLance series (first two trilogies) and Death Gate Cycle, from how often I read those series growing up. I haven't read either of them in years, but I still know almost every detail.
No books, but I can pretty much recite Die Hard, Jurassic Park, and Star Wars from memory.
Where the wild things are.
:shifty:
Homeland, Exile, and Sojourn, all by R.A. Salvatore. I've read that trilogy WAY too many times.
Science textbooks from high school.
I rarely ever read books. I don't have a particularly high tolerance for lengthy wordy descriptive run-on sentences of nearing-1000-page novels. I'm fairly selective that way. Aside from the fact that I pretty much glaze over the longwinded descriptive parts, I pretty much am able to remember much of the text of books I read after the first reading. My interest in the book is enough to make nearly every word stand out in memory. However, if I were to read it again, there's a chance I might start to wonder why I read it at all which could cause my interest to dip thus my memory of the text would gradually be replaced by things I like better.
Much of H.P. Lovecraft's oeuvre. I'm generally not one for rereading a lot, but they are fairly dense and lend themselves to a lot of unpacking of sentences and interesting vocabulary. Then I started reading a lot of them again with my wife. Then I found the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast and pretty much read many of them again to be fresh to listen to episodes.
I tend to listen to audiobooks or podcasts to help me sleep and ones I've heard before make it especially easy, so I've listened a lot of audiobook versions many times (love Wayne June's). I've also probably listened to most episodes of the podcast 2 or more times though most of those repeats are while drifting to sleep. Skeptoid is another fantastic sleep podcast. My wife almost can't sleep without Brian Dunning's voice, but that's sort of off topic.
Outside of Lovecraft, I really had a thing for The Count of Monte Cristo, but that book is a little much to have memorized.
Also, I don't understand the fascination with Ender's Game. I read it and enjoyed it. I got hung up on book 6 in the series mostly just out of being busy, but I've never reread Ender's Game. Maybe it's because the first time I read it I was already nearly 30 and it just didn't hit me the way it might a MS or HS age person. It's a so-so book with a sort of Mary Sue protagonist.
I liked Speaker much more. I feel like Ender's Game is like The Hobbit... lighter and more kid friendly. The following 3 are more like LOTR. Way denser and not necessarily for the youngest audience. They really got deep into some stuff and I personally kept feeling like Orson Scott Card was writing a screed against religion. Honestly, if I didn't know better, I would've thought he was an atheist author pushing his point of view through narrative a la Philip Pullman. It makes me sad that a man who can see the most horrible parts of religious bigotry and even touch on the topic of love not caring about gender... that same man can be so proud of his BS religious heritage and be one of the most vocally anti-gay people out there.
Wow... I suck at staying on topic.
Thankfully, he's managed to leave his nonsense beliefs out of the Ender books I've read (so far).
I found this quote today:
That much is definitely true for me. I grew up with it since the age of ten and it just kindof became a part of me. Had I picked it up at my age now or later in life, I'd feel much differently about it. I was reading about Ender at the same age he was in the story and it made it that much easier for me to relate to.Quote:
"If you don’t read Ender’s Game for the first time as a 12-year-old at the bottom of the social totem pole but convinced of your own transcendent intellect, you’re missing an essential part of the experience.”
Speaker is equally as fantastic, though, and second on my nearly-memorized list.