I mentioned in passing, writing about a book recently, that I don’t reread much, and it got more of a reaction than I expected, a couple messages basically asking what kind of person that makes me, in a tone that suggested the asker already had an unflattering theory. So let me actually explain it instead of leaving it as a stray sentence.
It’s not that I think rereading is lesser, or that I’ve got some productivity-brained aversion to spending time on something I’ve already extracted value from, though I know that’s a real phenomenon and I’ve probably got a mild case of it given how I approach everything else. It’s simpler and dumber than that. I have a genuinely long list, and a limited number of actual reading hours carved out of a schedule that already fights me for every one of them, and every hour spent on a book I’ve read stares back at me as an hour not spent on the four hundred books I haven’t. That math has always won, for me, even when I know intellectually that a great book gives you more on a second pass, not less, that you’re a different reader each time and the book meets you differently because of it.
I know this because it happened to me anyway, with a book I hadn’t intended to reread. I picked up a copy at my sister’s place a couple years back, something I’d read once in my twenties and mostly filed under books that had made an impression without leaving many specifics behind, and I ended up reading the first thirty pages standing in her kitchen because I couldn’t put it down, which then turned into finishing the whole thing over the following week even though I had two unread books sitting at home actively guilting me. It hit differently the second time in a way I genuinely hadn’t expected, entire passages I apparently hadn’t understood the first time around landed completely differently once I had more life stacked up behind me to measure them against.
I don’t think that experience has cured me of the general aversion. I still default to new over familiar almost every time I’m choosing what’s next. But it’s put a small crack in the rule, an acknowledgment that the math I use to justify never rereading is at least sometimes wrong, that a book you’ve already read isn’t always a used resource, sometimes it’s just waiting for you to be a slightly different person than you were the first time you opened it. I’ve got a short list now, maybe four books, that I’m keeping in reserve for whenever that crack widens enough to let one through. I’m not telling anyone what’s on it yet. Ask me again in a few years.