* * * * *

         I wonder if anyone has read 100 Years of Solitude 100 times?

> I have read two books more than a 100 times, for different motives and with
> different consequences. Hamlet I read a 100 times for my dissertation, The
> Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse [1] a 100 times for comfort. The
> experience is distinct from all other kinds of reading. I’m calling it
> centireading.
>
> I read Hamlet a 100 times because of Anthony Hopkins. He once mentioned, in
> an interview with Backstage magazine, that he typically reads his scripts
> over a 100 times, which gives him “a tremendous sense of ease and the power
> of confidence” over the material. I was writing a good chunk of my doctoral
> dissertation on Hamlet and I needed all the sense of ease and power of
> confidence I could muster.
>
> …
>
> It’s not necessarily the quality. The Inimitable Jeeves does not contain
> the best Wodehouse story. That is either Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend,
> which Rudyard Kipling called “the perfect short story” or Uncle Fred Flits
> By collected in Young Men in Spats. But there are no dull moments in The
> Inimitable Jeeves, no bad parts. Each plot is a novelty, without a trace of
> laziness. There is not a single weak verb in the entire book.
>

Via Hacker News [2], “Centireading force: why reading a book 100 times is a
great idea | Books | The Guardian [3]”

Interesting. I wonder what my friend Hoade [4] would have to say about this?

For me, I don't think I've read any book a hundred times, although I might be
in the upper two digits for a few books.

One book I've read so many times my copy is falling apart is _Hackers: Heros
of the Computer Revolution_ [5]. It's about three groups of iconic
programmers, the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) [6] graduate
students in the 60s (Green blatt [7], Gosper [8], Tom Knight [9], etc.); the
Homebrew Computer Club [10] group from the 70s (Woz [11], Felsenstein [12],
Captain Crunch [13], etc.), and the scores of teenagers banging out computer
video games in the 80s (John Harris [14]—all of this is from memory and I'll
stop now before I post the entire book from memory). I can certainly say it
had an effect on me and heavily influenced my views on programming.

Another book I've read dozens of times is _Have Space Suit, Will Travel_
[15], the first science fiction book I read (so it's heavy with nostalgia),
and one that doomed me to reading science fiction almost exclusively. My
favorite part of the book is when Kip (the main protagonist) is imprisoned on
Pluto and he spends his time figuring out how fast he travelled to Pluto by
knowing both the time (five days) and distance (30 AU (Astronomical Units)),
while upset that he doesn't have his slipstick [16] to help with the
calculations (and I now have a few slipsticks of my own because of this
book).

I'm not sure what that says about me, though.

Another book I've read uncountable times is _Snow Crash_ [17], a wild science
fiction cyberpunk romp of the near future where the United States Government
is just another franchise, and the main villain is a cross between H. Ross
Perot [18] and L. Ron Hubbard [19] whose hired hand, an Aleut harpoonist, has
been declared a sovereign nation unto himself (for he has his own tactical
nuclear weapon).

Yes, it sounds insane describing it, but it is really good, really funny, and
again, I'm not sure what it says about me that my favorite bits are the
exposition-heavy bits about neurolinguistic hacking.

There aren't many other books I've read quite as often as those, but if you
include comic books, then there are about a dozen or so Uncle Scrooge comic
books [20] I probably have read a hundred times or so …

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/books/pgwodehouse
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9027498
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-force-reading
[4] http://www.seanhoade.com/
[5] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B003PDMKIY/conmanlaborat-20
[6] http://www.mit.edu/
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Greenblatt_(programmer)
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gosper
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Knight_(scientist)
[10] http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-
[11] http://www.woz.org/
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Felsenstein
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Draper
[14] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harris_(software_developer)
[15] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1416505490/conmanlaborat-20
[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule
[17] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000FBJCJE/conmanlaborat-20
[18] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot
[19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Ron_Hubbard
[20] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0896590321/conmanlaborat-20

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