Why Our Reading Lists Should Include Books We’ve Read Before
The five different reasons I’ve reread books and why I plan to do it more often
I can count the fiction books I’ve read more than once on the one hand (as long as I discount my obsessive reading of The Monster At the End of This Book as a kid).
Most days, I feel desperate at the number of books I will leave unread because there is simply not enough time to get to them. Walking through a bookstore leaves me feeling panicked at all the good writing I will never know. It also leaves me feeling poorer since I can’t resist compulsively adding to my to-read piles, which are stacked precariously on every horizontal surface in my house.
People who routinely reread their favorite books are complete mysteries to me. How can you bear to relive the same story when there are so many stories left to learn?
People smarter than me have written about the value in multiple readings. Darius Foroux says, “Mastering anything requires endless repetition. If you want to live the lessons, you learn from books, and you have to read them over and over again.” Gavin Paul says part of the magic is unexpectedly discovering something new when rereading, and writing can bring us different insights during different phases of our lives.
