Long have I cursed my English teacher for forcing me to read the book The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. However, this fall, I forced myself to reread this book as part of the Half Price Books Book Club. As an older (though I won’t say wiser) person, I will admit I enjoyed re-reading the book more than I did reading it the first time, and am now willing to concede that the my English teacher might not have been as sadistic as I had once thought. It got me to thinking, what other books do I need to re-read? So, I turned to our 3,000 Bibliomaniacs and asked, what books do you think are better the second time around? And here’s what they had to say.
(1) The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum (2) Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (3) The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (4) A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle (5) Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott (6) Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (7) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain (8) The Odyssey, by Homer (9) The Princess Bride, by William Goldman (10) Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon (11) Slaughter-House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (12) The Purpose Driven Life, by Rick Warren(13) The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, by Etgar Keret (14) The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle (15) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (16) Italian Neighbors, by Tim Parks (17) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig (18) Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier (19) Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, by Luke Sullivan (20) Divergent, by Veronica Roth (21) Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins (22) Beautiful Creatures, by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (23) Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater (24) The Magicians, by Lev Grossman (25) The Illuminatus Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson (26) Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (27) Watership Down, by Richard Adams (28) Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury (29) The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner (30) A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Now, it’s your turn. Whether the books is better because of the foreshadowing you missed the first time or because you are older or just understand the storyline better, what book do you think is better the second time around? — Julie
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Julie is Production Manager at Half Price Books Corporate.
You may follow her on Twitter at @auntjewey.
The Half Price Blog 
I can’t choose between these two, which were both good the first time but even better on re-reading:
Catcher in the Rye
To Kill a Mockingbird
I was surprised by how much I’d missed on first reading.
wish I could save this to pinterest