The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, The Age of Innocence, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice—what do all of these novels have in common? They’re classics, of course, but that answer isn’t going to get you cool points In the Bookroom. More important to this blog, I’ve read each of them at least three times and am bound to return to them yet again to escape a mystifiying slice of magical realism (see my Half Reads Nearly Finished and Anna Katterjohn’s Half Reads in Accord). For lack of a better term, let’s call these books multireads, and while we’re at it, let’s count the ways in which they rock our cerebrums. For a book to make my multiread list, it’s got to have style—prose style—and F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Minnesota boy no less, had it in his spit. J.D. Salinger, not the most eloquent sentence-stringer, I know, but Holden Caulfield still slays me with his angst-ridden voice, the literary equivalent of James Dean’s Jim Stark from Rebel Without a Cause. I’d like to go on, but it’s Friday, and my brains are the consistency of medieval gruel. Speak, dear readers, or forever hold your Hemingways and mojitos.