Which books will you never read again?
Not because they’re bad or boring, but because you love them. You love what they mean to you, or what they meant to you when you turned that final page.
Relegating a book to the realm of wistful memories and fond nostalgia can involve some powerful feelings that are all wrapped up in both the story itself and the circumstances under which you first embraced it. I’ve laid to rest a pile of novels from my youth that I likely won’t revisit. I don’t want to squash my younger self’s joy by experiencing these books once more and taking on the very real risk that I’ll leave disappointed.
We come first to The Phantom Tollbooth, which would have been my immediate answer to the dreaded “What’s your favorite book?” question for quite a long stretch of my life. I first encountered the book in sixth grade, when my Language Arts class did a table-read of a truncated version of the novel as a short play. I was cast in the role of the Spelling Bee—perhaps a good omen for my future career as a writer. Enthralled by the characters and concepts, I ventured to the bookstore later that week and picked up Norton Juster’s classic novel.
I remember the book as a turning point for me as a reader. It taught me that fantasy could be wacky, full of puns and idioms brought to vivid life on the page. I was Milo, thrust from my doldrums in the real world into the realm of imagination.
Now, with many hundreds of beautiful and imaginative books behind me, I plan to leave The Phantom Tollbooth in my past. I’d much prefer to remember it as a turning point—a book that changed my life, in a real sense—than try to recapture the magic.
Journeying just a tad further back in time, we arrive in fifth grade, when I first read The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles by Julie Andrews (yes, that Julie Andrews). My fifth grade teacher—shout-out to Mrs. Holland—was instrumental in my growth as a reader and as a person, and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles sticks in my memory as her strongest recommendation. Julie Andrews’ fantasy for young readers sees the Potter siblings venture into a whimsical world that would be right at home in a Roald Dahl book. It was, naturally, the second fantasy book I’d read featuring a magical world populated by characters with the “Potter” surname. I credit the book with opening my eyes to the wider world of fantasy that existed beyond the more popular Potter kid. Knowing it’s a short, sweet read for elementary schoolers that I read at the perfect time firmly plants The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles in my memory as another seminal book I won’t read again.
Our stroll down my avenue of bookish memories now takes a short stop at the Ranger’s Apprentice series by John Flanagan. I read The Ruins of Gorlan in a single day during my sophomore year of high school. I couldn’t wait to start the next, so I went to Barnes & Noble to buy the next three books in the series. I plunged headfirst into the story, following Will and his teacher Halt on their medieval-ish adventures in this young adult epic fantasy series. From that point on, I’ve owed my love of huge series to Flanagan and his Ranger’s Apprentice books. Ever since I finished the core series, I’ve been a veritable series fiend. But I hesitate to reunite with Will, Halt, and company; I fear their exploits won’t have the same depth I’ve come to expect from my favorite books nowadays. However, when I see the Ranger’s Apprentice novels in bookstores, I smile and think about a hypothetical future in which perhaps I’ll get to share the series with my as-yet-nonexistent children.
Let’s jump forward now: as a Resident Assistant in a college dorm, with a room all to myself, I could read the nights away after churning out a paper or studying for a test. It was in these wee hours that I finished Peter and the Starcatchers, a four-book core series with a fifth-side adventure. I had met the authors—Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson—at a local meet-and-greet. My sister and I read through the series together, often during our self-created summer reading competitions (…must’ve been hard to parent such rebellious kids).
By the time I finished Peter and the Sword of Destiny (no relation to Andrzej Sapkowski’s Sword of Destiny), I was halfway through college and primed to switch over to reading more adult fantasy. The Peter series represented the end of an era, and while I would go on to read many other YA books here and there, this was the last YA series I read during a time when that was pretty much the only category of book I consumed.
Now, we get a little closer to the current day in this ambling through my history as a bookworm: In my mid-twenties, I decided to re-read A Series of Unfortunate Events before the Netflix adaptation premiered. What began as a blissful walk through a formerly favorite fantasy series soon became a slog, a grind. The later books were multi-hundred-page affairs, and I kept thinking I needed more from them. By now, I had become a reader who craved depth and plot beyond what Unfortunate Events could offer. They were often delightful, sometimes poignant, and generally good, but they just didn’t hit quite the same as they did when a young, wide-eyed Cole had picked up the 13-book series years before.
Despite the re-read slightly spoiling my taste for it, I still look back on Lemony Snicket’s series as a formative reading experience. Revisiting those books was the very inspiration for this article, since it lead to the realization that sometimes a story is best left in the wistful annals of your memories, to be revisited mentally instead of literally. And isn’t that the point? A story’s impact can last a lifetime, even if the story itself is but a distant, deeply fond recollection.
Are there books that you’ve memorialized in the same way? What stories call to you from the past, remembered fondly and still worthy of praise, but perhaps better left as fond memories? Let me know in the comments…
Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
Luckily go dog go still hits as hard.
I don’t think I have a book that fits in this category, but I am prompted to relay a different bookish lesson I learned from The Phantom Tollbooth.
Given this book as a present, I opened to the first page and was immediately repulsed by the dreary, plodding world inhabited by the boring young man who is the main character. I put the book down in disgust. Probably I must have reached a point where I was desperate for reading material—perhaps a trip to the library had been postponed—and as I worked my way past the gray into the marvelous technicolor language and imagery, I realized was enjoying the story more and more! This experience is what led me to decide that I must always read at least the first chapter of a book, and only then could I choose not to read the rest. This guideline has served me well for over 50 years now.
Not a book, but similar thing: I bought the DVD box set for Land of the Lost, because I have some fond memories of the first two seasons.
However, I have deliberately never watched any of them.
I’ve never reread Winter’s Tale By Mark Helprin. Too afraid the Suck Fairy will have drained all the magic away.
Huh. I think the only times this has happened for me were when I comprehensively Got Over adult series that I’d been really into, and that was because a) I subsequently learned the authors were really, truly awful people, b) older and more critical me looked back at the content and went “uh YIKES”, or c) some combination thereof.
I don’t often reread the faves I’ve outgrown, but generally when I do they hold up.
I can’t see how to quote, but @2 srEDIT.
I have a similar rule, I’ll either try and read at least the first chapter/50 pages or so of a book to give it a chance, or I’ll put it to one side and try it again at a later date. I originally stalled very hard on Peter F. Hamilton’s “The Reality Dysfunction” not long after it’s initial release, then read some of his other books and came back to it and enjoyed it enough to pre-order the sequels. So these days any book I’m not quite getting on with gets tried again later, usually 6-12 months and sometimes a few years.
On the topic of books that I’d like to reread but i’m scared won’t stand up to the test of time or my change in tastes and perspectives there are a whole bunch (including the Narnia series that I loved as a child), although I’ve been pleasantly surprised by some that I did try again even though in many cases they did feel a bit dated or simple
Then there are the books that I do reread, and realise how much more in depth or layered they were. For years I used to read all of the Discworld about every 2 years and it felt like I was still getting something new out of them almost every time, partly I suspect because I started reading them aged about 12 so a lot of stuff flew over my head.
For me, I wouldn’t reread The Last Unicorn. Not because I didn’t like it, but because I was crying so much I couldn’t read it. Same with the movie.
When I get a book, I’ll read the first chapter & then I’ll just open to a page in middle of the book & read a few pages. if it’s still interesting, I’ll get the book.
I had dubious taste as a kid so I’ve mostly moved on from those books.
Books that I love but can’t reread to are T Kingfisher’s horror books. I can read them once but never twice.
I don’t reread books. There are always new and older unread books to read.
A wrinkle in time. I actually did reread it and was very sorry since when I read it as a third grader it was the most thrilling adventure I could ever possibly imagine. As a 20 something it was still good but not the thrill I remembered. Now as a 70-year-old I’ll never touch it again.
Interestingly, that doesn’t tend to happen for me with books, though it does with television and film. But then, an awful lot of the books I read as a kid were way above my supposed (i.e., age-defined) reading level anyway… I pretty much always read adult-level books alongside kid books. I cut my literary teeth on stuff from my mom’s bookshelf, including “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and “The Mason Williams Reading Matter” and a bunch of RodMcKuen poetry. And today I will still happily read kids’ books alongside more mature fare – not just re-reading old favorites, but also new YA books that weren’t around when I was a kid, or that I somehow missed the first time around. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t jar for me… I never really thought of adult books as something one “moves on to”. For me they’re just different genres, in a sense; my inner child and my inner adult get along pretty well together. :) It’s not the same for tv and film, though; I’ll happily re-read “The Phantom Tollbooth” in my 50’s, but show me an episode of “Welcome Back, Kotter” and I think, “My god, I used to WATCH this stuff?” Lmao!
It took me a few minutes of hard thinking to really iron out a book or books that I will never read again. I first went to my favorite book “Assassin’s Quest” by Robin Hobb. It didn’t fit the bill because I keep coming back to it. I found it in a used bookstore when I was 10, and I’m nearly 40 and I’ve read it a dozen times over.
So, not Hobb, but Goodkind, that’s the one. “Wizard’s First Rule” pulled me into fantasy head first. I hated reading until a friend let me borrow it for a long road trip. I read it before “Assassin’s Quest”, and should probably be thanking it for opening the door to all the wonder. At the time I didn’t quite follow what Goodkind was putting down, but the more I read into the rest of the series and the older I got I could read between the lines and I didn’t like what I found. I do cherish the time I spent with The Seeker and the First Confessor, but I think I will do it from a distance, admiring them on my bookshelf.
The only book/series I loved in childhood that I think might not hold up is Lost Years of Merlin by T.A. Barron. It tends to be popular books/series that come to my attention, so they tend to be good storytelling and I know they’ll hold up. Those ones start to feel too familiar, and that becomes a different reason I don’t think I’ll reread them, but there’s still the odd chance I’ll pick them up again someday.
Lost Years of Merlin was something in the vein of Chronicles of Prydain (British/Welsh mythology based, young audience oriented, YA before YA), it was pretty much my introduction to fantasy, and certainly to Arthurian legend, and I went from that pretty much straight to Wheel of Time, with a stop at The Hobbit along the way.
I think I outgrew the children’s section at my local library pretty fast. I started on Artemis Fowl and A Series of Unfortunate Events, got maybe three books into both series and stopped. One thing was they were still ongoing series then, and I wasn’t really aware when later books came out and so lost track, but also for A Series of Unfortunate Events especially I became aware of the outline, how some things always happened the same way in every book, and it got repetitive, it’s the first series I consciously decided not to continue.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy. A beautiful, harrowing book. I finished it with a profound sense of serenity but the journey to get there was so often bleak and sorrowful that I can’t really make myself reread it.
In a related McCarthy anecdote, I tried to read Blood Meridian, but the publisher had seen fit to put a long academic foreword in that analysed and spoiled the book. I know it’s a modern classic and all, but many of us haven’t read it, so having the entire plot and its subtext put under a microscope before even reaching the first of McCarthy’s own sentences was a bit rough.
The series that sprang immediately to mind was The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. They were probably some of the first mystery books I read as a kid and I devoured all of them, but I remember trying to re-read one when I was maybe a teenager and finding it incredibly twee. I’ve since decided not to touch any Enid Blyton books and leave them be in the past.
More recently, and for a completely different reason, I’ve wondered whether I’ll ever read NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy again. It’s so so good but so bleak. I don’t know if my heart could take it.
I made the mistake of re-reading A Wrinkle in Time, and there was none of the magic of reading it as a child. Mostly I wanted to smack the oh-so-special mansplaining Charles Wallace.
One in five of the books I review on my site are books I read as a teenager in the 1970s. Some stand up. Others turn out to have virtues I overlooked. Others … there’s a reason that review series is called Because My Tears Are Delicious to You…
I loved the Heinlein Foundation series when I read it many years ago. It was my seminal Science Fiction book. But, by now, I have seen too many critiques and I fear to reread it because I don’t want to destroy my love for it.
In general, I rarely reread books these days because my TBR list keeps expanding, seemingly exponentially.
There’s another road that leads to this topic: having read and enjoyed some really dodgy stuff in earlier years. For example, I still have the first 10 or so Gor novels by John Norman that I tore through when I was 14. I guess I keep them around to remember how creepy 14-year-olds really can be.
Me but with any of the Harry Turtledove novels and short stories I read as a teenage
I was glad to read this article to learn that someone else shares my feelings about rereading certain books!
The book I will never read again is Laddie by Gene Stratton-Porter. I wish I could remember how old I was when I read it. All I know is that I loved it so much and I’m sure that reading it as my adult self would ruin the wonderful feeling I get when I think back on the story.
I don’t know how you cannot re-read a book you love so much. If I read a book that I enjoyed so much the first time I read it than I’ve no doubt that I will indeed at some point revisit said book, be it a book that I read as a kid or one I’ve read in my later years. If you love a particular book so much, why shouldn’t you revisit it.
The only reason I never revisit a book that I’ve previously read is if I didn’t like it the first time I read it & thankfully that has been extremely rare. I am however considering reading out of sheer curiosity The Sword of Truth series just to see if that series of books is really as awful as everyone says it is and if they are indeed than yeah I may never end up reading that particular series of books ever again.
Completely agree with AJ. I often reread books from my childhood: the ones that spring to mind are “Mara” (Eloise Jarvis McGraw); anything at all by C.S. Lewis, but especially “The Great Divorce’; “The Doll’s House” and “Miss Happiness, Miss Flower” (Rumer Godden); and the Ring series (JRR Tolkien — although I admit that I usually just scan for the poems these days).
I find that even in my 61 year old brain, these kinds of books always have new things to offer..
The Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
That series is what really turned the corner for me as reader. Except for kids’ picture books and any assigned books from school – which I remember almost none- I had only read comics, up until my early teens. Then on a trip to the mall bookstore with my mom, I saw the Boris ( and Neal Adams) covers on the 80’s Ballantine Tarzan series, got one, and never looked back.
As an adult, I just can’t bare Edgar Rice Burroughs’ writing. Not too mention, I can’t ignore problematic racism and misogyny that I don’t think I even noticed when I read as a kid.
The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell. Profound, life-changing, harrowing encounter. Not sure I could ever attempt it again, even (this time) knowing the end.
I remember finding Raiders from the Rings, by James Nourse, in our small public-library branch when I was young and had trouble reaching top shelves. I can still picture the green cover. I took it out from that library several times. At a time in my life when I was fascinated by spacefaring science fiction and by worlds with different family/social structures, this one caught my imagination. That was also an age when my previously-childlike daydreams would have been shifting to include some sexual fantasy component, which might explain some content that stuck with me. The idea of being the one teenage girl accidentally kidnapped into a society where all children her age were boys … in the book that didn’t go anywhere sexual, but in my head it did.
And yet, I’ve never read it as an adult, and I’m pretty sure that from a 50-years-later perspective I wouldn’t like it. Trite? Sexist? A whole society that’s only sustainable with non-consensual practices? I really don’t want to find out, and I don’t want to lose whatever memories built those fantasies. I’ve also never looked for fanfiction.
I can’t remember if I’d read anything else by the author, either.
I see other mentions of A Wrinkle in Time, and sadly I’m also someone who ruined that book by re-reading it as an adult. The writing was so bad that I couldn’t get past the first 30 pages. My preteen self was much less discerning. Since then, I’ve resigned myself to never re-reading anything I read in my child/teen years.
Stranger In a Strange Land. A perfect book for 16-year-olds and transformative. Like a previous poster I really don’t want to bring a modern lens to this book.
The Bordertown anthologies edited by Datlow and Windling left vivid and fond memories for me, my adolescent bad-haircutted self was completely captivated by the world created by them and the authors in that series. I almost picked up a copy of one I saw in a used bookstore last year, but couldn’t stand the thought that they might seem dated and without the magic I’ve held onto in the decades since. Man I loved that serie
I discovered science fiction in high school and promptly dove in. I can still reread some of my faves, but most of the Heinlein juveniles don’t work for me any more. The dialog is still good, but only males are protagonists; only males do the Important Stuff and I can no longer relate (but I could when I first read them, which says something). Norton is more readable, perhaps because her male protagonists don’t have the inborn arrogance of Heinlein’s males – they just get on with whatever wants doing.
I’m thinking I’ll probably never re-read anything else by Steinbeck, because I loved East of Eden when I was about 19 but was crushingly disappointed when I picked it up again 40 years later.
This post immediately brought to mind a non-fiction book for me: A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins. This is the review I wrote for it on Goodreads a (large) number of years ago.
Definitely a book that I loved too much to ever read again.
Where to begin: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Up From Jericho Tel, Dark Wizardary, The Wrinkle in Time Quintet and Howls Moving Castle. I loved the World of Hogwarts and Lord of the Rings and the movies for both did justice to the original stories but my imagination and love for reading started way before those.
seconding jdn’s “my tears are delicious to you” reviews
we are of an age, so read many of the same titles. sobering.
_highly_ recommended
The Black Cauldron Series
Changeling
See Jane Run
Stranger With My Face
Books by Lois Duncan in general – I read almost everything she had
Peirs Anthony the XANTH books
Hmm, this is interesting, but I personally have never experienced this. I love to reread books I loved, and the more it meant to me, the more times I reread it. Although having a big time gap in between can give a really nice experience of rediscovery.
32: I don’t think I will reread any fiction by Steinbeck but I just found my copy of The Log of the Sea of Cortez and it’s in Mt Tsundoku.
The Sword of the Lamb series by M.K. Wren–when I first read them, they were incredibly intense, and I loved them. Upon an adult reread, I realized that the class structure was so rigid that any character under second class Fesh barely existed except as a paragraph’s worth of stereotype.
And every time I even think of the Skylark series by EE Smith I want to totally rewrite it.
I rarely find re-reading a book to be an issue. I look at it more like revisiting an old friend. I will admit to not having re-read many of the books I grew up reading, like Ribsy and The Mouse and the Motorcycle. But those books were meant for children and while I don’t think it would ruin what they meant for me, I just have so many other old friends I have collected over the years to try and re-read every I have read. One example was while I was stationed in South Korea, a small unit located in the Taebek Mountains. I only took three books with me, the LOTR trilogy, but by the time I left I with two book boxes full. I have most of them still and it’s been over 30 years and I know I have re-read each of them at least once. Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children is certain a set a re-read regularly. And, yes, I still re-read LOTR every couple of years.
It’s rare that I chime in this late with something new, but the one book I loved and can’t read again is Dune. It’s a fantastic tale, and it truly is one of the greats, but every time I reread it (I think I’ve read it four times now, but maybe more), the flaws show up more, and if I read it one more time I’m afraid it will ruin it forever.
For those who wonder how you could not reread a book you loved… I tend to agree. I’ll always reread them at least once. But some, like Dune for me, get worse with every retelling. Stop before you forget why you loved them in the first place! I’m about there with Narnia, but I can still reread Lord of the Rings forever, though I do it much less often now that I have it practically memorized.
@12: My nephew introduced me to Goodkind. He came to visit my parents when he was a young teen, and I was fortyish, and was reading number 4 (whichever one that was!). I read that, then started at the beginning, but like you I didn’t like what I found and never finished that series.
@14: I can’t read The Road again, either, but I don’t think that’s quite the point of this article. It’s not a book that one can love. It was profoundly moving, and brilliantly written, but so, intentionally, bleak.
@19: Go easy on 14-year old you! My recollection of Gor is that the first four or five were pretty innocuous. After that, I was surprised and, admittedly, 14-year old me was entertained, but eventually even teenagers can realize that’s not healthy.
@39: I’d reread Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knight (Morte d’Arthur) any time, but it’s arguably not his fiction.
I seriously am afraid my TBR pile would attack me in my sleep if I re-read something rather than taking one off the big pile, LOL
That said, while I may never re-read The Phantom Tollbooth I always keep a copy in case I meet a child who needs it as much as I did. Gone through quite a few copies that way, and then I go buy another one ;-)
A couple of people have mentioned The Road . It’s the best book I will never reread.
Reread both A Wrinkle in Time and The Phantom Tollbooth, and may re-read them again.
I’ll second the suggestion of Burroughs, who was awesome when I was a kid but not so much later. And I’ll add the Lensman and Skylark books from Campbell. I re-read them a while back, and the thrill was gone. I could see the sexism, the racism, and the general 1950’s-culture-is-supreme mood.
I agree that I can infinitely re-read Lord of the Rings, and do occasionally re-read Heinlein’s juveniles, accepting them for what they are. I might never re-read Iain M. Banks’s tales of The Culture, oddly, because while they were very good I might never feel the need to re-read them.
I’ll probably re-read Ursula K. Leguin’s Tales of Earthsea (having read them many times), yet somehow I doubt I’ll re-read Octavia Butler. I am not sure why; it’s not that Leguin is better or that Butler is worse, just… Having read them, I don’t feel the desire to return to those worlds. It’s hard to explain.
“and do occasionally re-read Heinlein’s juveniles, accepting them for what they are.”
In fact, I have no trouble re-reading any of his old stuff, juvenile or adult. It his late stuff that I’m done with!
I have read “The Kite Runner” and “A Thousand Splendid Suns” by Khaled Hosseini and will never ever re-read them. They are masterful, powerful and emotional roller coasters that leave you wrung out at the end. The writing is superb and everything that you want in a story. However, the emotional beating that you take is what makes them worth the read and why I cannot read them again.
Such memories! I had forgotten how much I loved Gene Stratton Porter’s ‘Girl of the Limberlost’. Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land were on my desert island book list. Favorites were Bradbury, Nourse, Norton, basically what SF/F I could find in the libraries; Caldwell, Lofts, Costain, Yerby, Slaughter, many other historicals but I just can’t read any of them again. I want to edit them, either for unnecessary exposition or characterizations, or missed opportunities. Even LOTR! I used to reread it every year, from the Ballentine paperbacks to the publication of all Tolkien’s extra-Middle Earth notes and stories; about 20 years ago I stopped.
Pretty much everything I loved or liked when I was a child 60 years ago I still can enjoy on some level – even stuff that actually isn’t very good like Burroughs, the Monkees, early 60’s Batman. I disliked Burroughs’ last Pellucidar book when I read it a couple of years ago, but that doesn’t count because it wasn’t a re-read. Racism and sexism in older books and films doesn’t bother me – being an elderly white male may be part of the reason for that.
Wizard’s First Rule, etc., was one for me, as mentioned in another comment. Loved the fantastical world as a young reader, enjoyed the TV show, realized what a slog the series was becoming and chose my own endpoint. Wouldn’t go back.
Also a second vote for Anthony’s Xanth series. The one time I opened one in recent years, I was shocked at how uncomfortably sexist the first pages were. Maybe some are more so than others, but not worth the time to me to explore them again. Still, I read them voraciously in high school, and remember the silliness fondly.
Most children’s books that I remember fondly, I would at least consider rereading to see how they strike me now. I sometimes like this measure of how I’ve changed over the years. :)
When I was a kid the idea of rereading things did not appeal to me, there was so much to read that I just wanted to have something new each time. When I did my degree I kind of had to reread things and in my twenties I did find myself doing it more, things like LOTR which I’d read the volumes out of sequence based on what was in my local libraries.
But I did keep books that I thought I might want to reread at some point, and during lockdown I did end up doing quite a bit of that. I was fascinated to find how some books had rewired my brain a bit in terms of what I wanted from fiction. The truth is a lot of the stuff I read as a kid now is too simplistic for adult me. I’ve read Narnia again and sort of skimmed over the top of it. It wasn’t badly written but it didn’t have meaning for me in the same way. also Harry Harrison books I adored as a kid now seem to be the product of a less sophisticated age.
Oddly enough I did reread the Sparrow and its sequel during lockdown, having not read it in about 20 years, and it was as harrowing as the last time!
Iain M Banks though I read and find new subtleties each time and just lament the fact that no one really seems to be writing in the same space he did (possibly Arkady Martine?).
Re-reads can be a very different experience. In college I read Kate Chopin ‘s The Awakening and thought it all so romantic and tragic. With a recent reread while preparing curriculum my reaction was “Seriously? She did it for a lover?” Maybe I’ve become cynical.