In late August, on a visit to Tiffin University’s Toledo Academic Center, I swung by the Toledo Zoo to exercise my membership card. I was there for just an hour, but had lots of fun with the seals and taking pictures.

Little kids love to hear the same story over and over again. Even when they know the words by heart, they cry out for some beloved adult to read some treasured narrative over and over, and woe be unto anyone who forgets a word or tries out a new version. Growing up in church, we also read the same thing over and over. Let’s face it, we’ve got one book, and if you’re in church long enough, you’re going to have time to read or hear about just about every part of it. And, let’s also be honest, there are some bits in there that are not really all that conducive to out-loud reading or study. (I’m looking at you Numbers!) So that reduces the raw amount of readable material even more. But, as we know, that repetition is not boring. We come to these well-known passages at different times in our lives, from differing perspectives throughout our maturation, and the word speaks to us afresh again and again.

That phenomenon is also true with the books we read. When I was what would now be called a “tweener”, I read Old Yeller at least three dozen times. I first read Frank Herbert’s Dune in high school and still find it interesting 20 years later. Just last summer, I re-read another sci-fi book I first discovered as a teen, Robert Forward’s Dragon’s Egg.

But more than just re-reading a book, I’ve found that there are certain works that I feel compelled to re-read on a somewhat regular basis. It might be yearly, or every other year, or even at longer periods, but there is still something that regularly calls me back to these works, something that the work does to me that I need. For these works, it’s more than just that I re-read them, but that I feel a “need” to re-read them. I know I’m not alone in this. I have a friend who reads Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings every year. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to list those works that I find myself drawn back to on a regular basis. I’m not going to rank them or offer any explanation. And I won’t ask you for any explanation either, but I do think it would be fun if you listed some of the works that you find yourself “having” to re-read on a somewhat regular basis. Oh, and since I’m going to assume that all you good people are reading your Bible quite regularly, you don’t need to list it here. And for now, let’s limit ourselves to books.

• Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings
• Melville’s Moby Dick
• Eco’s The Name of the Rose
• Sayers’s Gaudy Night
• Miller’s Death of a Salesman