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This week I’m looking at books that I think are worth rereading - and that I’ve reread more than once. These stand up to my tests, and I’ll try to articulate what it is I like about them. If any of them intrigue you, I hope you’ll give them a shot. I envy you the first-time experience.

Puzo’s great rags-to-riches story has diverted me from more deadlines and projects than I’d like to admit to. It’s an ideal combination of violent crime thriller, intricate palace intrigue, and affecting immigrant experience from the epigraph (”Every great fortune starts with a great crime” - Balzac) to the last line (”Then with a profound and deeply willed desire to believe, to be heard, as
she had done every day since the murder of Carlo Rizzi, she said the necessary prayers for the soul of Michael Corleone.”). Coppola’s film (from the parts I’ve seen) captures the nearly suffocating atmosphere of secrecy and code of ethics that governs the Corleone Family, but the details Puzo created still have a resonance that I’ve not taken from the visual representation.

For one thing, the great central section of the novel, following Vito Corleone’s life from Sicilian poverty to the pinnacles of power, had to be filmed as Godfather II. To me, that is the most interesting story - not Michael’s seduction into Family life, because Michael had grown up with nearly complete knowledge of the Family’s olive oil business. As Puzo describes it, Don Corleone’s ascent from invisible laborer to a man of respect is the result of a mature decision followed by a ruthless struggle to achieve his vision. It is also the portrait of an immigrant who takes the American Dream to its logical and frightening extremes by seeing through the myths of American society.

Corleone’s small-f family has some great dynamics to it. The undisciplined eldest...