The 5 Books I Re-Read Every Year — Cultural Digest #14
Some things you just can't get enough of.
I have been fiendishly devouring the English language for as long as I can remember, it is utterly sacred to me. There is a quality so visceral in it, so potent, so connected to my being, that even just the shape of words on a page can transport me through a vortex to unknown worlds, forbidden knowledge and soul expansion beyond my wildest imaginings. I am rarely happier than when I am reading or scribbling thoughts and ideas down, toying with language, seeing just how far you can stretch a thought.
As someone who is also very basic and horribly nostalgia-prone I am not one to shy away from revisiting the familiar either. But with books, rather than seeking comfort in what I already know, I am forever seeking more depth. I want to be challenged. I want enlightenment — I want adventure too. Reconnecting with reading fiction during the past year has been life-changing and is now my number one go-to for soothing my nervous system.
The books listed below I have read countless times. I will read them at least once a year but sometimes multiple times because they read differently each time and gift me with something new. They are prisms of truth and reflect back to me where I am in my life at any given moment based on my own experience when revisiting them. There’s a neutrality to their narrative, or the narrator, or both. They are written in a way, perhaps by design, that you can’t help but project your own narrative onto them. They serve as vessels to embody wherever you are on your own journey. Interestingly, and this is the first time I have observed this, four of the five are centred around the actual physical journeys of people in search of something themselves.
I have many bookshelves in my house and am in the process of cultivating the feeling of a library throughout it but I have one bookshelf that is dedicated entirely to the books that mean the most to me. It holds space for those treasures that have had the biggest impact on my life as well as those that I’ve owned forever. It contains far more than just the ones I’m choosing to share below but of all the books on those shelves, these are the five (dog-eared, smudged, and revered) that I go back to again and again and would freely recommend to anyone who is at a bit of a crossroads right now, feeling stuck, or even if you’re seeking fresh inspiration.
BIG MAGIC :: Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m going to say this is the most referenced book across my Substack posts so if you’ve been here for a while it will come as no surprise that this book is on the list. I reference it constantly because I think of it constantly. I mention it to friends constantly too. It is steadfast in my mind always as a means to hold me up when my confidence wavers, to allow me to feel the fear and do it anyway. It is a permission slip to engage with our unique relationship to creativity and imagination and artistry without apology, and a reminder that we are all creative because thought is creative — this book taught me that with utter conviction.
If you are interested in exploring the mysteries and obstacles of creative process, this is the master study of it. In the past I have referred to BIG MAGIC as my ‘bible’. I often keep it by my bedside or carry it round with me because I look at it so often. I find it’s one that you can whip through in a couple of days or casually dip into for guidance, as necessary. The chapters are satisfyingly short and yet packed to the brim with practical knowledge alongside hilarious and painfully relatable anecdotes. It is written so beautifully that if Elizabeth Gilbert wasn’t so definitively forthright on the pointlessness of comparison and envy, you’d wish you were her and give up but this is the book that will get you over yourself, and on with your unique and important work — which might just look like play.
EAT PRAY LOVE :: Elizabeth Gilbert
Yep. Sorry, not sorry. I LOVE ELIZABETH GILBERT. This was the first book of hers that I read and I attribute it with my spiritual awakening. Like BIG MAGIC it has been re-read multiple times but usually just the once a year as opposed to it being a constant guide. This is a book that continues to evolve with me and reads differently each time I return to it affording me completely new levels of inspiration and enlightenment. Having mentioned these books serving as vessels, Elizabeth Gilbert herself discusses this very thing in BIG MAGIC —
One day, for instance, a woman came up to me at a book signing and said, “Eat Pray Love changed my life. You inspired me to leave my abusive marriage and set myself free. It was all because of that one moment in your book—that moment when you describe putting a restraining order on your exhusband because you’d had enough of his violence and you weren’t going to tolerate it anymore.”
A restraining order? Violence?
That never happened! Not in my book, nor in my actual life! You can’t even read that narrative between the lines of my memoir, because it’s so far from the truth. But that woman had subconsciously inserted that story—her own story —into my memoir, because, I suppose, she needed to. (It may have been easier for her, somehow, to believe that her burst of resolve and strength had come from me and not from herself.) Whatever her emotional motive, though, she had embroidered herself into my story and erased my actual narrative in the process. Strange as it seems, I submit that it was her absolute right to do this. I submit that this woman has the God-given right to misread my book however she wants to misread it. Once my book entered her hands, after all, everything about it belonged to her, and never again to me.
Elizabeth Gilbert, BIG MAGIC
I was also away on a retreat learning to meditate for the first time when I read it so it felt and still feels deeply personal, not least because as I found out recently, the day I first set foot into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and met Phoebe Waller-Bridge, was also the very same day that Elizabeth Gilbert stepped onto a plane to begin her Eat Pray Love journey. The fact that we both also chose to acknowledge the twenty year anniversary of this on here — her by launching her own Substack, me by sharing a Fleabag reading, the kismet of it all, I just… I can’t even wrap my head around it honestly, let alone articulate further. I could share more of her books as part of this list as well but I’ll pause here for now and just say that I recommend anything she’s ever written as well as her new Substack, obvs,
.SIDDARTHA :: Herman Hesse
Siddartha is a book so rich in its exploration of existence, of consciousness, of soul, that page by page, word by word, comma by comma, almost by osmosis, it draws you deeper and deeper within. The first few chapters for me I always find a little challenging, just like trying to settle into a meditation. It feels can’t-see-the-wood-for-the-trees dense like another language that you can’t quite make sense of but feel compelled to keep trying to commune with regardless. It is so meta and immersive an experience in that way. But by the end you will find yourself out in the open, fresh air in your lungs, sun radiating light and warmth on your skin, at one with its language, with its myriad messages (they change every time), with its story, with the river and you will want to stay there in its peaceful, simple embrace and understanding of all things, forever.
This book is essentially the Buddha story but follows a man called Siddartha who renounces his given life in search of enlightenment during the time of Gautama Buddha. Another story within a story? This is a book for souls seeking direction whilst secretly knowing that the only path worth treading, is one’s own. It beautifully asserts that whatever it is you are seeking, is also seeking you.
THE ALCHEMIST :: Paolo Coelho
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read this one, I’m reading it again even now. I feel as though some people are snobbish about it but this book’s simplicity is its true gift. It feels like an old story, passed down through many generations though it is of course relatively modern. First published in 1988 The Alchemist is a short, quick-as-you-like read of a folk tale on following your dreams and fulfilling your destiny, with all the joys and painful disappointments that inevitably form part of that journey.
Like a really satisfying training montage in a sports hero epic, you traverse with Santiago from the Andalusian foothills to the Egyptian pyramids growing in courage, wisdom and my favourite, irony, along the way. It is mystical and magical. A real gateway of a book to propel you into connecting with your inner truths and the enduring guidance of your intuition.
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NORTHERN LIGHTS :: Philip Pullman
Ok so I’m cheating here, really it’s the full His Dark Materials trilogy but they could read as one. Try picking Northern Lights up and not charging across worlds and dimensions to get to the end of the whole lot without coming up for air. These books mean so much to me. Much like Harry Potter, I came to them in the later flurries of their popularity so my first two of the three are paperbacks but I remember eagerly waiting by the door for the post on the day The Amber Spyglass came out.
Love. Faith. Grief. Humanity. Power. Corruption. Family. Sounds a lot like Succession and though this is a fantasy trilogy it is one that is deeply rooted in our reality - as well as many others. It is visual, meditative, a narrative wonder. I queued for hours overnight to see the theatre production at the National Theatre in London — a two-part, full day epic. I got to be in the TV adaptation which was a project I pursued for four years to be involved with. If I had to pick one of the books it would be Northern Lights, the first. This is the one I annually return to but chances are I won’t stop there.
Lyra’s relationship to Will, to Pan, to the alethiometer, to her found family, to Dust, all of it resonated so deeply with me. If you have no idea what I’m talking about because you haven’t read this book but are also someone who finds yourself relentlessly curious and endlessly questioning of the world around you, this is a multiverse of riches to get lost in.
BONUS SIXTH BOOK
THE LITTLE PRINCE :: Antoine de Saint Exupery
A last minute addition! I couldn’t not give this philosophical literary wonder a shout out across the universe after discovering it recently for our A Little Night Music readings. I’ve read it five times this year as part of that but I know I will be coming back to it in the years to come.
The Little Prince offers up countless lessons on listening, innocence, belonging, potential and following our dreams, I wrote much more about it as part of the readings you can catch up and listen to the full book here.
If there’s another theme amongst all of these books as well as journeying, it is of course the pursuit of our heart’s desire, including my own. I’m not sure there’s anything I prize more highly than cultivating a dialogue with that aspect of ourselves so it’s unsurprising to find it present in each of these books. Simplicity too. The most complex in terms of literature is Siddartha but even then, the prose will guide you effortlessly, where you are willing to go.
Any of these immediately sparked your interest? Or that resonate with you the most right now? What books do you continue to go back to year after year?
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