Books I Read Twice

Or hope to.

This is a guest post by Tom Ricks.

Stephen King, at the end of successive editions of his wonderful book On Writing, lists books he enjoyed. That inspired me to compile this list of books that stayed with me so much that I read them again (or plan to). I’ve left out the obvious classics that everyone reads, such as Hamlet, the King James Bible and Huckleberry Finn.

I read a lot of books. I’ve read thousands. But this short list collects only those books that I’ve read twice.

Novels and memoirs

George V. Higgins—The Friends of Eddie Coyle. This was the first time I ever finished a book and immediately began reading it again. The first time I read it for the plot, to find out what would happen. The second time was to see how the author did it.

George Orwell—Homage to Catalonia. A terrific book on war.

George Orwell—Animal Farm. Probably the best political work of the 20^th century.

George Orwell—1984. Judged by the writing, perhaps the weakest book on this list. But an impressive presentation of a political nightmare.

Mary Karr—The Liar’s Club. I am not sure why, but this account of growing up in southeastern Texas in the 1960s reminded me of the best of Mark Twain.

Ann Patchett—Anything she has written, but especially Commonwealth.

Elizabeth Strout—I liked Olive Kitteridge, but I was stunned by her earlier Abide With Me.

Percival Everett—The Trees. This book is both funny and horrifying. Quite a feat. His novels James and Erasure are better known, but after you read those, try this.

John Updike—Couples. A miniaturist, perhaps, but with the skills of a major writer. This is the best book I know about the transition in America from the 1950s to the 1960s. I’ve read it three times.

Chester Himes—A Rage Up in Harlem. I only started reading him in the last year, almost by accident. A terrific novelist. I am surprised no one ever recommended him to me.

Political essays

James Baldwin, anything on America. I think he is our Voltaire.

George Orwell, anything on politics, authoritarianism, and power

Histories and biographies

Pekka Hamalainen—Indigenous Continent. A different way of looking at North American history. One of the best works of history I’ve ever read.

Pekka Hamalainen—The Comanche Empire. How one tribe rose to great power and held it for a few decades. It changed the way I look at this country.

David Hackett Fischer—Almost anything by him, but especially Albion’s Seed, Washington’s Crossing, and Paul Revere’s Ride. Albion’s Seed is massive, but yes, I read it twice.

Bernard DeVoto—Across the Wide Missouri. Great book to read while driving around Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.

James McPherson—The Battle Cry of Freedom. Still my favorite one-volume history of the American Civil War.

W.E.B. Du Bois—Black Reconstruction in America. A brilliant work of history challenging the dominant view of his time. The last paragraphs are hair-raising. I am in awe of the mind and character it took to produce this volume.

Ron Chernow--Titan. A biography of John D. Rockefeller, a complex man who shaped our country in ways that still resonate.

Robert Graves--Good-Bye to All That. A memoir of World War I that captures the post-war mood. I think I have read it four times, but the last time I didn’t like it as much.

Eugene Sledge—With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. A great memoir by a young Marine who inexplicably survived World War II and then became a professor of biology.

Taylor Branch—The multi-volume biography of Martin Luther King Jr. The best history of the 1960s I know.

Patrick Radden Keefe—Empire of Pain. How one company made billions of dollars by addicting America to painkillers.

Patrick Radden Keefe—Say Nothing. One of the best books I have read on war and its effects on people, in this case the anti-British insurgency in Northern Ireland.

Robert Paxton—The Anatomy of Fascism. Published in 2004, it unfortunately is a good book to read about America in our time.

Sciences

Marcia Bjornerud—Reading the Rocks. How geologists understand the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s history. I like books like this because good geology requires great efforts of imagination, to cast one’s mind to scales that make all of human history a minor miniature.

Bernd Heinrich--Ravens in Winter. How to observe nature, how to learn from it, and most of all, how to write about it.

Poetry

William Butler Yeats--Every couple of years I go back to his post-1916 poems.

Baseball

Pat Jordan—A False Spring. A memoir of being a promising minor league pitcher who fails. Most people fall short of the top, so this is a book for us all.

Jonathan Eig—Opening Day. An account of Jackie Robinson’s first season in the major leagues. For my money, the best book ever written about baseball in America. And that is saying a lot.