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.