{"id":12560,"date":"2014-02-07T08:30:12","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T13:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=12560"},"modified":"2014-02-07T08:30:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-07T13:30:12","slug":"books-youve-read-a-hundred-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=12560","title":{"rendered":"Books You’ve Read a Hundred Times?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A hundred times may be an exaggeration, but as a child, I read many of my favorite books dozens of times and more. In the bookstore, I often hear parents bemoaning their children’s repeat reading.\u00a0Adults sometimes worry when kids choose an old favorite over a new discovery, but both are signs of being healthy readers.\u00a0While I understand that more media are competing for children’s time, and so picking up the entire\u00a0Harry Potter series every summer might take a serious chunk of hours away from other books, I still think that avid re-readers tend to be avid readers, period. And that re-reading can be a very valuable endeavor.
\nPeople re-read books for all kinds of reasons: to catch things they missed, to revisit a favorite world, to find comfort in a familiar and much-loved story. We talk about “digesting” books, and I think re-reading is part of the total absorption in a fictional or nonfiction world.<\/span>
\nI think I did the bulk of my re-reading between the ages of 8 and 14. Charlotte’s Web <\/em> by E.B. White\u00a0probably tops\u00a0my list, along with The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles<\/em> by Julie Andrews Edwards, Mr. Pudgins<\/em> by Ruth Carlsen, The Enchanted Castle<\/em> by E. Nesbit, Half Magic<\/em> and Magic or Not<\/em> and the rest of the seven books by Edward Eager, Magic in the Park<\/em> by Ruth Chew (now back in print, hooray!),\u00a0Gone-Away Lake<\/em> by Elizabeth Enright, The Witch Family<\/em> by Eleanor Estes, Island of the Blue Dolphins<\/em> by Scott O’Dell, My Side of the Mountain<\/em> by Jean Craighead George, The Phantom Tollbooth<\/em> by Norton Juster (how did that not win a Newbery, by the way?!), The Book of Three<\/em> by Lloyd Alexander, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle<\/em> by Betty MacDonald, The Little Prince<\/em> by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry,\u00a0The Wolves of Willoughby Chase<\/em> and Black Hearts in Battersea<\/em> by Joan Aiken, The Saturdays<\/em> and the others in the series by Elizabeth Enright, A Girl Called Al<\/em> by Constance C. Green, To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em> by Harper Lee, A Wrinkle in Time<\/em> by Madeleine L’Engle, and so many more. I also used to read the Lord of the Rings trilogy every summer, about eight years in a row. (Oddly, I never felt the desire to return to The<\/em>\u00a0Hobbit<\/em> after a reading or two.)
\nOh, I know I’m forgetting a boatload of favorites!! I’m not counting books I read two or three or even four times, but books I read ten, twenty times and more. I think I read Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles\u00a0<\/em>21 times. Clearly, there was something there that kept drawing me back: the imagination, the charm, the brightness, the magic, the humor. The bedroom slippers! Mumbleumbledum. <\/em>(Ahem. I’ll continue.) And Charlotte’s Web<\/em>! What an endless source of inspiration, simple and profound, funny and sad, full of characters and heart and suspense and lots of love. I read a passage from The Little Prince<\/em> at my mother’s memorial service, and another from Charlotte’s Web<\/em> at my grandmother’s. These books became part of the fabric of my being, beats in the rhythm of my heart. I knew lines by heart, maybe even sections. Re-reading didn’t detract from my development as an eclectic reader; it provided something different, a journey I knew I wanted to embark upon yet again.
\nSo, while I happily help kids who are in fact stuck re-reading books because they just can’t find their next great read, I also try to reassure parents, letting them know that re-reading can, in fact, be one of the hallmarks of becoming a fluent lifelong reader.
\nWhat books did you read countless times? And do you know why, or is it a bit of a mystery?
\n 
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the joys of re-reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12560\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}