I don’t know if this is something that lots of people do, or just me, but I tend to reread books I like a lot. A lot a lot. Some books I read approximately every six months or even more, like Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman ( I know I’ve already talked about this book, but really, seriously, it’s amazing), or any books by Maureen Johnson (everything by Maureen is both very readable and very rereadable), or Letters to a Young Poet. My dad thinks this is a terrible habit – he claims that one of the only books he even considers rereading is Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett.
On the one hand, I love rereading books. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. I think you can learn so much from some books that there’s plenty still left undiscovered the second time around, especially in really dense books like anything by Neal Stephenson. And, if you’re like me and read a lot of books probably a little too old for you when you were little, there’s tons of stuff you understand on a reading when you know a little bit more about the world. Plus, there’s this really great sense of nostalgia. I think someone said once (and I can’t, for the life of me, remember who) that a younger version of yourself gets caught in the pages of books you read when you were younger, so visiting childhood books is like seeing yourself at six or eight or eleven again.
But, on the other hand, rereading books that I love over and over again doesn’t exactly encourage me to try anything new. That’s one of the reasons I decided to challenge myself to read one hundred new, intellectually challenging books this year. I read plenty on my own, but oftentimes I don’t seek out anything new, and just reread Harry Potter for the thousandth time. This is the main reason I’m behind Dad in terms of how many books I’ve read (it certainly has nothing to do with the fact that I’m thirty years younger than him or anything). Also, if you’re reading a book you’ve already read in public, and it’s a fairly well known one, people will come up to you and say things like, “Oh, that’s a wonderful book! You’ll really enjoy it,” and I always want to tell those people, “yeah, I know, I read it already, that’s why I’m reading it now. So go away.” But I feel that would somehow be inappropriate.
Anyway, what do you guys think? How much rereading is too much rereading? Is it a worthy pursuit, or should I stop wasting my time and go read my chemistry textbook?
