read and reread

The ALA has conducted a study of the most re-read fiction. I tried to find the actual study, but was unsuccessful, here's an MSNBC story about it. Tolkien, Austen and Shakespeare figured prominently, as did the Harry Potter books and Winnie the Pooh.

Some writers were asked to share their favorite rereads:

For professional writers, re-reading can be as much for education as for pleasure. Susan Minot, whose books include the novels “Monkeys” and “Folly,” said she likes to go back to the works of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. She doesn’t read the whole book necessarily, just enough to remind her of why those writers matter.

“They were probably the earliest authors who blew my mind, and so they’re the ones I’ll check back with, getting reacquainted with the voice,” she says.

Richard Ford, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Independence Day,” said he likes to re-read Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer” in a “a purely sensuous way.” Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex,” says he re-reads Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” obsessively, almost continuously, calling it his “literary caffeine.”

“The language of that book, which is to my mind Bellow’s greatest achievement, reminds me of what I’d like to be doing,” Eugenides said.

For the record, I mostly reread Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Carroll (though not lately), Eduardo Galeano, a couple of anthologies of Latin American short fiction that blew the top of my head open when I was 17, Shirley Jackson and my favorite poetry collections.

Y tu?