I’ll have to pick up a copy of From the Corner of His Eye. Thanks for the recommendation, @Meka_r_Brown!
Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Probably ten times or more. I buy a new copy from a thrift store every time I re-read so I can’t see my previous comments. I read it for the first time in my early 20’s and my daughter calls it my bible. So much of what I believe comes from this book that she could be on the right track.
Another I’ve reread several times is Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.
I’ve read Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song several times and again just recently since the death penalty is being used in several states again.
I read Moby Dick several years ago - maybe in my 50s? I’m very curious, @Linda_O_donnell, what about it draws you in repeatedly? I confess it was a struggle for me. I’d like to read it again with a different perspective.
Maybe because I first read it in what might still considered my formative years, but for me it had so many fundamental truths about people and religion and life itself. Melville’s character, Queequeg, was especially enlightening. The homoerotic relationship with Ishmael was a revelation about sexuality.
And aboard his first whale ship where he aspired to learn about Christianity, he found it more miserable and wicked than his father’s heathern religion and he decided to die a pagan.
Ishamel describes him as “this soothing savage” and says Queequeg “redeemed his splintered heart when Christian kindness proved no more than hollow courtesy.” It seemed to me that the savage was more Christian than any of the Christians I met on Sundays in church.
Thoughts about death and dying were soothed for me when he said, “Take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.”
Oh, and Ahab. “…he’s a grand, ungodly, godlike man” and “Ahab’s above the common” and “I know what he is - a good man - not a pious good man, but a swearing good man” and “Ahab has his humanities” and little Pip saying he thinks Ahab’s hand is “a manrope to hang onto.”
And, of course, Ahab saying, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
Besides all that, it is a very funny book. For real! Almost from the very beginning. Chapter Three describes Ishmael’s quest to learn about the painting that hangs to one side of the entry of the Spouter’s Inn. If that search is not funny, I don’t know what is!
And then, there is the beauty of Melville’s prose. One quick example: “… all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow.” The alliteration is masterful.
Won’t bore you with anymore, but I never tire of Melville’s relevance, especially in today’s world. Thanks for asking and for listening.
@Linda_O_donnell thank you so much for sharing! Guess I’ll need to take another go at Moby Dick. I “read” it in audiobook format about 15 years ago, so perhaps that was one of the problems. I sometimes find it more challenging to enjoy a complex book when I’m listening to it (short attention span) as opposed to reading it.