Three years ago I posted an almanac entry drawn from an essay by L.E. Sissman called “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf”:
A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.
A reader of this blog has now invited me to draw up my own five-foot shelf of books that I like to reread. As I doubt I need to remind you, I turn to the novels of Raymond Chandler, William Haggard, Elmore Leonard, Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald E. Westlake, and P.G. Wodehouse when I feel the urgent need to relax. Here is a shortish and by no means comprehensive list of other, more variously ambitious books to which I have also returned with fair regularity in recent years:
• Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20 and The Russian Girl
• Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking
• Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor and Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu
• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
• James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed, Guard of Honor, and The Just and the Unjust
• Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb
• The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson
• Carl Flesch, Memoirs
• Gielgud’s Letters: John Gielgud in His Own Words
• Moss Hart, Act One
• Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night
• All of the novels of John P. Marquand
• Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, The Narrow Margin, and The Razor’s Edge
• Edwin O’Connor, All in the Family and The Edge of Sadness
• The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor volume (very much including the letters)
• Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music
• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King and A Time to Be Born
• All of the novels of Barbara Pym, but especially Excellent Women
• The Library of America’s Reporting World War II
• David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
• Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path
• Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
• Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour
• Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
I make no claim, by the way, that all of these books are “classic,” or that I think they’re better than other books that I reread less often (or not at all). They are nothing more—or less—than books that I like to reread fairly often for reasons that are in some cases not entirely clear to me. Make of that what you will.