Last week, Steve Roesler had a marvelous post on his All Things Workplace blog that was titled "Are You Sure You're Reading the Right Stuff?" Steve is great at the kind of post that sparks discussions and I've returned to it several times.

I realized that there are many things I've read more than once. I go back to them because they often have a practical value, but also because, in one way or another, they touch my soul.

So I got to thinking about what I've re-read and what are the books that have touched my soul. Here are some of my thoughts.

My complete works of Shakespeare is dog-eared and the spine is cracked and cracked again, but if I get a new one I won't have the notations of a lifetime to remind me of important lessons and who I was when I learned them.

In a telephone conversation, Steve said to me something like, "after Drucker it's all commentary." I find it so. I re-read the two-books-that-are-really-one, The Effective Executive and Managing for Results at least once a year. I've been doing that since the late sixties. I'm still learning from those books. They are the only "management" books that I routinely re-read.

There are my two favorite books on strategy, B. H. Liddell Hart's Strategy, and Warfighting, the official doctrine of the US Marines, penned by one of the great commandants, Al Gray. There is also a book of the heart, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Some writers only produce one great thing, but that is more than most of us and it is enough.

On my bedside table there are rotating works by Hemingway and Fitzgerald. I just finished A Farewell to Arms. It's about time for the Great Gatsby again. Hemingway's complete short stories live there so when the craving strikes I can read one of his stories before sleep.

The literature of my heart is often poetry. I love Robert Frost and I covet with a shameful intensity the signed volume of the complete poetry that my brother-in-law has. I love Dylan Thomas, John Donne, and all the great rhythmic poets like Tennyson. I used to read them to my daughters when they couldn't sleep.

But I also love Richard Eberhart, a poet hardly anyone loves anymore. And I love specific poems, like Hart Crane's "My Grandmother's Love Letters" that touch me for reasons my conscious mind cannot discern.

I love military history. I come from a family that produced generations of warriors for the Prussian fortress cities. So I love reading books about how military leaders, in dangerous times, met great challenges. I like almost anything by John Keegan. I love Smith's biography of Grant and Wert's biography of Longstreet.

I dip into almost all my military history books. I'm searching for a good biography of Wellington, one worth re-reading.

In his poem, Ulysses, Tennyson writes:

"I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world"

I am a part of all that I have met and all that I have read, but they are a way to see and understand what lies ahead. One of the things that I re-read often is one of my father's sermons.

It was titled "No Stopping Allowed." I posted it on another site, with some additional commentary.

My father preached that sermon when he was 82. He was still moving forward, as we must. We do it carrying bits of all that we have met and read and seen. We do it with our heritage in hand. We pick up the rucksack of our memories and heritage, strap on our gear and start moving forward toward the opportunity that's just over the next hill.

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