November 29, 2004

Reread Any Good Books Lately -- Or Ever?

Hugh Hewitt asks here for the blogosphere to name modern novels worth rereading. I guess he means ones we've actually reread.

There was a nomination here of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. Hysterically funny, especially if you've been to The Big Easy.

Must be a Pelican State moment, because I had already thought of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Also a 1949 movie.

This in turn put me in mind of A. J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana, which is not a novel but reads like one.

Members of my family have nominated To Kill a Mockingbird, Angela's Ashes, ( a memoir, not a novel, but who cares?), and Body and Soul. I've never read any of these.

Zoë, my eighth-grader, is reading Mockingbird in English class, and is frustrated because they take so long. Zoë devours fantasy books. She's read over 9,000 pages since school started in September. After a bit of cross-examination, she chose Rhapsody, by Elizabeth Haydon, or for a younger child, The Wind Singer by William Nicholson. Zoë has good judgment about these things.

Katharine, the sixth grader, would probably stick with the Harry Potter series as a reread. I'd reread them, too, had I but world enough and time.

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