Booking Through Thursday: Repeats

This week, BTT asks: "What’s the first book that you ever read more than once? (I’m assuming there’s at least one.) What book have you read the most times? And–how many?"

You know, I can't honestly remember the absolute first book I read more than once. But I'm pretty sure it was probably a Little Golden Book. Maybe The Poky Little Puppy or Scuffy the Tugboat. Or Little Red Riding Hood -- that one was always one of my favorites.


Or The Real Mother Goose -- not an LGB but a book I really loved (still do and still have my childhood copy). Or The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings -- I just re-read that one again, not long ago.


Of course, the sticky point here is "reading," since I most likely had those books read to me, at least at first. When I was a tot in Texas, kindergarten (or pre-school as we call it now) was not a universal, expected thing for everyone -- some kids went and some didn't. None of the schools near us offered any kind of pre-school program, so I didn't go to school until I was six years old. By then, I could read a little, but not enough to do a lot of reading on my own. So even though I had a large library from the time I was old enough to look at pictures, the reading part would have come later.

So, I'm thinking that the first book I actually read on my own more than once was almost certainly Alice in Wonderland. Probably the Little Golden Book of the Disney version, and then the Lewis Carroll classic.



And that's probably the one book I've read the most times, too (although I have no idea how many). There are several others I've read multiple times -- Huck Finn, Wuthering Heights, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn. But Alice's dream journey is the one story I always love to lose myself in, no matter how old I get.