The four books I finished, then read again immediately
Like most people, I have books I read over and over again.
I also have seasonal reads, such as the Jilly Cooper novel I pick up as soon as the autumn leaves start to turn.
But books where you turn that final page and can do nothing except go back to the beginning to devour it all over again immediately… Well, they’re a different breed entirely.
I have four of those (so far): a classic, a young adult novel, a memoir and a work of modern fiction, each one leaving me with a literary itch (technical term) which could only be scratched by going back to the start and reading them all over again…
‘The Three Musketeers’, Alexandre Dumas
This was one of those books where the writing is so rich I actually felt the words on the page. Not only that but physically touched, smelt and experienced the world Dumas created. The French writer’s opus (imo, because I know a lot of people consider Monte Cristo to be his finest moment) held me in thrall to every word on the page. I became so hooked I began setting my alarm earlier in the morning to get a few more pages in before I had to get up and go to work. The Three Musketeers is a book which made me consider any time spent not reading it a waste.
‘Twilight’, Stephenie Meyer
I read Twilight a couple of years after it came out in 2005, and pretty much inhaled it during a holiday to Margaret River on Australia’s east coast. Looking back, it was more the cadence and pace of the book I connected with, experiencing one of those rare moments when the culture met where I was in life in that moment.
The trip itself was one of those slow, loose, dreamy holidays where there were no set plans and I didn’t have to be anywhere at any time, a rare state of being which Meyer’s slow, dreamy prose seemed to mirror. The literary equivalent of a teenage girl with time on her hands slowly wrapping a strand of hair around her finger.
‘Hunger’, Roxane Gay
The honesty in Hunger is breath-taking (and heart-breaking), and put me inside Gay’s body to walk around in for a while.
The way she finishes her big, self-revelatory statements with the simple phrase: “I do and I don’t” resonated with me. Perfectly expressing that feeling when you both know and don’t know why you do, say, think or feel something. This was the first time I felt someone had expressed on the page what it was to simultaneously experience denial and acceptance, and that to both know and not know doesn’t mean you’re lying or being tricky or disingenuous..
‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’, Lionel Shriver
Shriver’s ‘what not to do’ manual on motherhood is one of those books which leaves you breathing a sigh of relief that you’re not like the FMC Eva, while also suspecting that you’re guilty of a lot of the things she does. Famously child-free herself, Shriver, through Eva, manages to nit pick away at those tiny cuts motherhood can make in your soul, and the constant questioning over whether what you’re doing is right, wrong, or turning your child into a future mass-killer. The twist, when it came, was a genuine shock – a rarity these days.