You open it up and flowers come flying out, or demons, or visions
of a turn-of-the-century town, or the room you lived in in college.
It might be any edition, it might be one particular copy.  Do you
have any books like that?  (They don't have to be books you read
much anymore, just books that unfailingly draw you in and make
you happy.)

10 responses total.

My 1956 Oxford "English Romantic Poetry and Prose."  md's ur-text.

Robert Frost's Collected Poems, the one before In the Clearing.

The Naked Face of Genius, by Agatha Fassett, republished by Dover
as Bartok's American Years.  I saw it on a library shelf when I
was a teenager, and thought: "'The Naked Face of Genius' -- I bet
that one is about Bartok."  True story.

Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse.

A Collins Classic limp-leather-bound selection of Wordsworth.

1950s paperback editions of Leaves of Grass (35 cents) and Walden (25
cents), both of which I still have, although they're falling apart
so badly that I never open them anymore.

Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems.

Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us.

Petersen's Field Guide to the Butterflies.

  Usually if a book's worth remembering I get so absorbed in it that I
  don't tend to link specific recollections to the memory of its reading.
  However, for some reason I do have strong associations tied to my
  battered, second-hand copy of "War and Peace" -- occasionally I pick
  it up for a bit an re-read a section or two when I run out of other
  reading material around the house and such a reading always brings vivid
  recollection of a week's vacation one February spent holed up alone in
  a cottage in the west Michigan dunes while the falling snow piled up on
  the deck and blanketed the pine trees and the empty summer homes
  around me and the memories of the quiet and solitude of that time are
  very comforting to me.. 

  Usually I'm not a very "good" vacationer -- there's so much I want
  to do that when I get some time off it's always earmarked for some
  special purpose: usually I visit family or travel and try to jam in as
  much activity as I can, frequently leaving me more exhausted upon my
  return than I was on my departure.  This particular week, though, came
  at a time when, weary of my job and seeking a change, I had accepted
  a new job and arranged for a few weeks off before I had to start.
  It was such a treat to just slow down for a week and sit down with a
  great book (though it's possible, perhaps, that any book would have
  done I think not many would have suited the week so well or been
  so memorable) and watch the snow pile up outside the picture window
  that that week (during which I didn't even come close to finishing
  the book, I should add for the sake of truthfulness..) has become
  indelibly associated in my mind with the characters and their travails..

No. I read books once and thereafter they live in my mind. I do use books
I have read as references. Rereading books very rarely probably is because
I have such a huge to-be-read list/pile. However as a child I read my fewer
books many times over.

  I'm a dedicated re-reader..  Perhaps others are able to get everything
  out of a book on their first pass but in even the simplest book there
  can be many things that I missed the first time around (or wasn't in a
  position to understand fully in the case of foreshadowing or allusions
  to events which have happened but not been revealed yet..)  The books
  I enjoy most are the ones that benefit from many re-readings.  There's
  a special kind of delight in discovering a new facet of something you
  thought was so familiar..

I *do* reread while reading, to do what Mike says. I may have several
finger at different pages so I can check back, relate, compare, etc. You
might say I read a book partly in parallel, rather than serially. But to
start over from the beginning and just reread? I can't do that. For one
thing, the previous reading is not as fresh in my mind as when I reread
while I read. 

  I'm probably going to reread Blue Highways again. I just loved that book
that I didn't want to put it down. 

THE BAD POPES, by E.R. Chamberlain; a history of six sordid medieval 
papacies, the circumstances which led to them, and their legacy, all 
written with delicious understatement.  My undergraduate student household
wore out two paperbacks of this one.
 
The last two books in James Blish's "Cities in Flight" series:
EARTHMAN COME HOME and THE TRIUMPH OF TIME.  EARTHMAN is typical 
John Campbell/Astounding derring do among the stars, mixing in 
didactic lessons on economics and politics.   TRIUMPH is a richer 
book; Blish developed near-immortality for his spacefarers so 
he did not have to use a FTL drive, and in the end of the series
he decided to present his long-lived charcters with the physical 
demise of the universe.
 
For really cheap trash, I can read Peter O'Donnell's "Modesty Blaise"
books forever.    I, LUCIFER and A TASTE FOR DEATH are the two 
best, as they introduce the best supporting players in the series.
 
Ursula K. LeGuin's THE LATHE OF HEAVEN.  Over the years I have come to 
value this one more than her big sexual/political novels; I love 
the shifting realities that George Orr creates.

Hmm.  I go back to the Cities in Flight books regularly, too, and I'd also
add _A_Life_for_the_Stars_ with the two you mention ... but, yes, _The_
_Triumph_of_Time_ is the best, on the whole.

I have too many candidates to really want to get started trying to list them.
I reread a lot - partly because I find so little current stuff worth reading.
(I know there's good stuff out there, but wading through all the rest
makes finding it a big job.)

  The Prince of Tides is turning out to be a very magical book. I will
probably buy a couple more Conroys when I finish.

I've got huge associations with my copy of M.M. Smith's _Only Forward_, with
snowth's copies of Jonathan Carrol's _Sleeping in Flames_ and _Bones of the
Moon_, and the Ann Arbor Public Library's copy of _Genesis of a Music_.

Also my old copies of the Lord of the Rings. 

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