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The Repeat Reads You Love To Revisit

Even though New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead (our Jan. 30 guest) might suggest you can read her new book without reading the classic Victorian novel to which she pays glowing tribute, we as a staff wondered what other books all of you "live in."

Rebecca Mead
Rebecca Mead

For Mead, that book is George Eliot's "Middlemarch," a classic novel of love, life and marriage in middle England. Mead told our host Tom Ashbrook that she's been reading and re-reading "Middlemarch" for more than 30 years. While not a "guide to life," per se, it does provide her "a lens through which to look back."

We asked you on Facebook and Twitter for the books that you turn back to again and again (and again). Here's a partial list of the books you shared with us.

The Books You Return To Again And Again (And Again)

  • "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
  • "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
  • "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell
  • "From Sarajevo With Sorrow" by Goran Simic
  • "How To Solve It" by George Pólya
  • "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes
  • "Shadow of the Wind" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
  • "The Story of A Bad Boy" by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
  • "The Giver" by Lois Lowry
  • "A Wrinkle In Time" by Madeleine L'Engle
  • "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury
  • "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
  • "Science and Sanity" by Alfred Korzybsk
  • "Tik-Tok of Oz" by L. Frank Baum
  • "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier
  • "Interview with the Vampire" by Anne Rice
  • "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel García Márquez
  • "Absalom, Absalom" by William Faulkner
  • "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin
  • "The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy
  • "Geronimo Rex" by Barry Hannah
  • "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck
  • "The Plague" by Albert Camus
  • "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
  • "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole
  • "Travels With Charley" by John Steinbeck
  • "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace
  • "The Four Cardinal Virtues" by Josef Pieper
  • "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page" by Gerald Basil Edward
  • "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck
  • "Birds Without Wings" by Louis de Bernières
  • "The Power Of One" by Bryce Courtenay
  • "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • "Fragile Things" by Neil Gaiman
  • "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene
  • "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck
  • "All The King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren
  • "Anna Karenina" Leo Tolstoy
  • "Nine Stories" by J.D. Salinger
  • "Earth Sea Trilogy" by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • "Fifth Chinese Daughter" by Jade Snow Wong
  • "The Shooting: A Memoir" by Kemp Powers
  • "Catherine the Great" by Robert K. Massie
  • "Around The World in Eighty Days" by Jules Verne
  • "Survivor" by Chuck Palahniuk

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As for your web producer, the book that I turn to year after year is "The Phantom Tollbooth," Norton Juster's classic adventure in the Kingdom of Wisdom. Every time I drive through the tollbooth with Milo, I'm reminded of the joys of learning and the wonders of discovering new things. Like "Middlemarch" for Mead, "The Phantom Tollbooth" is the gentle, guiding lens through which I can re-examine my own life and adventures, however normal they may sometimes seem.

What books keep you coming back for more? Let us know in the comments below, or on Facebook, Tumblr and @OnPointRadio.

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