Difficult to know where to start, I just love reading so much. It's been what's kept me alive at so many points in my life.
In terms of cycling books, the only one I have ever throught was worth reading more than once was Tim Krabbé's
The Rider, and that's worth reading many times.
As a kid and teenager and beyond, I used to read
The Lord of the Rings annually, although I actually prefer(ed)
The Silmarilion, which is more mythic. However, these days the only books from my childhood I revisit occasionally are the Earthsea books, starting with
A Wizard of Earthsea, and of course Ursula Le Guin has continued to write them with an older readership in mind, even though they were never your average YA books in the first place. The last book in the series,
The Other Wind, is a truly beautiful book at least partly about ageing. Le Guin is without a doubt my favourite SF and fantasy writer.
Scanning my bookshelves here, novels I reread fairly regularly include books including
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink,
The Arabian Nighmare by Robert Irwin, Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita, Italo Calvino's
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller,
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, William Gibson's
Neuromancer, Roberto Bolaño's
The Savage Detectives,
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Peter Matthiessen's
Shadow Country, Kim Stanley Robinson's
Mars Trilogy, Tove Jansson's
The Summer Book,
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown (and of course, his poetry), lots of Thomas Pynchon, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delaney and Philip K. Dick, Bruce Sterling's
Schismatrix,
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, Alain-Fournier's
Le Grand Meaulnes,
Diaspora by Greg Egan, Haruki Murakami's
After Dark,
Q by 'Luther Blissett',
The Bone People by Keri Hulme, Frank Herbert's
Dune. I could go on...
Short stories by Raymond Carver, Lucius Shepherd, Edgar Allen Poe, M.R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, Ursula Le Guin (again), and lots and lots of poetry...
Of things that have been influential on my life and thinking, I've read and reread Andre Gorz, Ivan Illich and E.F. Schumacher over the years.
