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Most books we read just once. Excepting students of popular culture, who cares about yesterday’s bestsellers? Our thrift stores are awash in unwanted copies of “The Da Vinci Code.” A few books, however, become lifelong companions, works we regularly turn to for comfort, solace, inspiration.

Novelist Ruth Rendell once said that she reread Samuel Butler’s “The Way of All Flesh” every year — until finally switching her annual attentions to Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier.” Every December more than a few people pick up Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” There are devotees who have practically memorized Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” or Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.”

Yet between the books we read and those we reread periodically, there exists another category: the books we find ourselves crazy about and hope to revisit someday. While these can be recognized classics such as Plato’s “Symposium” or George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” many are lesser-known, even slightly eccentric works that nonetheless spark in us an almost inexplicable delight.

What follows is a list, annotated more or less from memory, of 22 books that enchanted me when I first encountered them and that I look forward to rereading. So take a look — perhaps it includes a favorite title or two of your own.

1. ‘Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse,’ by Hugh Trevor-Roper

Known (and feared) for his intellectual rigor and scathing wit, historian Trevor-Roper gradually unravels the truth about a distinguished British scholar and old China hand, who turns out to have been an inveterate rogue, cheat and forger.

Penguin

2. ‘Nights at the Circus,’ by Angela Carter

The misadventures and loves of Sophie Fevvers, an aerialist with real wings, deliciously related by England’s greatest magic realist.

The unconventional life of Angela Carter — prolific author, reluctant feminist

3. ‘The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,’ by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

An amateur enters a solo round-the-world sailboat race in his trimaran the Teignmouth Electron, begins to cheat and then, somewhere off the coast of South America, goes mad.<b> </b>A gripping and harrowing journey into darkness, reconstructed from Crowhurst’s log by two ace journalists.

4. ‘Death of a Citizen,’ by Donald Hamilton

As a teenager, I devoured the Matt Helm spy thrillers. In this first of a long series, Helm — a former OSS agent now married and working as a professional photographer — must abandon his safe, civilian life when figures from his past call him back into action.

5. ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript,’ by Robert K. Merton

An otherwise serious professor of sociology at Columbia, Merton here goes on a learnedly humorous spree as he traces, with footnotes, the origin and afterlife of Isaac Newton’s famous remark, “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Princeton University Press

6. ‘Eros the Bittersweet,’ by Anne Carson

Learned, poetic and freewheeling, this philosophical meditation on love and desire established Carson as the most innovative and original classicist of her generation. “On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case.”

Library of America

7. ‘Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,’ by Richard Hofstadter

When, back in the 1990s, I first read this enthralling, crisply written history of our country’s dismal attitudes toward learning, it seemed to illuminate every aspect of our politics and national character. My guess is that it still does.

8. ‘Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould,’ by Kevin Bazzana

Besides being a great pianist, Gould was deeply neurotic about almost everything, preferred to eat just one meal a day — steak and potatoes — and enjoyed reading serious philosophy. Bazzana’s biography is utterly mesmerizing. As Gould used to say, “One does not play the piano with one’s fingers, one plays the piano with one’s mind.”

9. ‘The Pyrates,’ by George MacDonald Fraser

An over-the-top comic romp sending up every nautical swashbuckler ever published or filmed. Its dramatis personae includes that paragon of English manhood, Ben Avery, the likable scoundrel Colonel Blood and, not least, Sheba, the ultrasexy pirate queen who, anachronistically, favors Gucci thigh-high boots. Written by the author of the racy adventures of Flashman, the Victorian soldier, cad, ladies man and survivalist.

In another life, I wrote a dissertation on Henri Beyle, a.k.a. Stendhal. Of that endearing author’s lesser-known works, I remember being especially charmed by this hodgepodge of biography, reminiscence and travel guide, a factually unreliable but utterly delightful love letter to Italy and music.

11. ‘The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs,’ by John Sladek

Revered as science fiction’s most adept satirist and parodist (see his sendup of Philip K. Dick, “Solar Shoe-Salesman”), Sladek here surveys various crackpot cults and pseudo-sciences, outlining their nonsense in a tone alternating between wryly amused and deeply appalled.

Penguin Classics

12. ‘The Tale of Genji,’ by Murasaki Shikibu

Is this the greatest novel in the world? I pretty much thought so as I read — 30 years ago — the six volumes of Arthur Waley’s pioneering translation, first published in the 1920s and admired ever since for the beauty of its prose. When I eventually return to “The Tale of Genji,” though, I’ll probably switch to Royall Tyler’s more scholarly and accurate version in two fat volumes.

13. ‘Feasting With Panthers,’ by Rupert Croft-Cooke

A sassily irreverent, but informed and informative, survey of the Uranian (homosexual) milieu around Oscar Wilde in late Victorian England. Like the archetypal wit and aesthete, Croft-Cooke also spent time in prison for what was once called “gross indecency.”

Mariner

14. ‘Invisible Cities,’ by Italo Calvino

In one- or two-page vignettes, Marco Polo describes some of the more fantastic cities of Kublai Khan’s empire. A marvelous prose-poem of a book, William Weaver’s translation is now available in an elegant Folio Society edition that enhances Calvino’s imaginative chinoiserie with illustrations by Dave McKean and an admiring introduction by Jeannette Winterson.

15. ‘Another Part of the Wood: A Self Portrait,’ by Kenneth Clark

Ever wonder about the ultracivilized host of that classic 1969 television series “Civilisation”? Scholar, connoisseur, museum director, television personality, aristocratic socialite, Clark here recalls his early life and those who shaped his mind, including Bernard Berenson. An irresistible memoir.

16. ‘Four Studies in Loyalty,’ by Christopher Sykes

In the best of this book’s four portraits, Sykes affectionately memorializes Robert Byron, author of that seriocomic travel masterpiece “The Road to Oxiana,” which records the journey undertaken by these two friends through 1930s Persia and Afghanistan to research ancient churches and monuments.

17. ‘A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives,’ by D.W. Robertson Jr.

The past is often stranger than we imagine, which is why we need guides like “A Preface to Chaucer” to understand allegory, biblical symbolism and the nature of love in the poetry and art of Europe’s Middle Ages. Similar books include C.S. Lewis’s “The Discarded Image,” Erich Auerbach’s “Figura,” E.M.W. Tillyard’s “The Elizabethan World Picture” and Ernst Robert Curtius’s “European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages.” I could happily reread them all.

18. ‘The Poisoned Chocolates Case,’ by Anthony Berkeley

Who was the intended victim of the deadly box of candy? The stymied police consult the six members of the Crimes Circle, each of whom proffers a different, increasingly more sophisticated solution to the murder. A dazzling tour de force.

19. ‘Paris Journal: 1945-1965,’ by Janet Flanner

Here, in effect, is the you-are-there cultural and political history of post-World War II France, as chronicled by the New Yorker’s legendary correspondent. My copy of the book once belonged to one of Flanner’s friends, the novelist Glenway Wescott, who in an inscription calls it “required reading” for any Francophile. Over the years I’ve occasionally dipped into this National Book Award winner but really should reread it — and its companion, “Paris Journal: 1965-1970” — from start to finish.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

20. ‘The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe,’ by Charles Nicholl

The playwright who gave us “Dr. Faustus” — “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” — underwrote his poetry and plays with a shadowy second career as a spy. Did an argument over a bar bill, the so-called “reckoning,” lead to his death? Or was it a contract killing? The whole world of Elizabethan espionage is brought to blazing life in this true-crime masterpiece.

21. ‘Collector’s Progress,’ by W.S. Lewis

The editor of Horace Walpole’s voluminous correspondence looks back on the fascinating and eccentric people he met — and the books he acquired — as he pursued material by the great 18th-century letter-writer and author of the first Gothic novel, “The Castle of Otranto.”

22. ‘Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man,’ by Thomas Mann

Mann’s last, incomplete novel recounts the adventures of a handsome young charlatan, a non-murderous Tom Ripley, who works as an elevator operator in a grand hotel and seduces and charms his way to success. It’s as effervescent as a bottle of Krug champagne.

Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and author of the memoir “An Open Book,”  the Edgar Award-winning critical study "On Conan Doyle," and five collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book,” “Classics for Pleasure” and "Browsings." 

Michael Dirda

22 books to reread

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Penguin; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Library of America

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Some books are meant to be reread. Here are 22 that I would turn to again.

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