The Importance of Re-Reading
The idea of re-reading is a strange one, profoundly out of place in a consumerist society. Those who re-read discuss how the experience helps them remember the first, implicitly more memorable time they read a book. Those who don’t re-read talk about how they don’t have the time. Instead of retreading the same material, they choose to burn with Pater’s famous “gemlike flame,” always looking for new experiences. Re-reading—not as a flailing, ultimately doomed attempt to recapture the feeling of reading a book for the first time, but as a distinct experience as rewarding as a first read—is rather alien to us.
From a news business focused on capturing the attention of the masses through constant, flashy updates, to tech companies focused on marketing slightly improved versions of devices the consumer base already has, what defines contemporary experience is novelty and constant stimulation. The new is exciting, offering a temporary escape from stultifying routines. The new also makes money. Our economic system relies on convincing people that what they have currently is not good enough. The problem with this premise is not that it’s necessarily wrong or that the new is inherently bad. Buying new books, just like new clothes or new appliances, can be a great opportunity for us to expand our horizons, and living in an era of prosperity where we can chase the new is a positive. The problem is unthinkingly accepting the fundamental precept of mass-consumption: that the breathless pursuit of the new will fundamentally bring happiness.
Reading a book for the first time fits into normal patterns of consumption. Admittedly, not all consumption is mindless. Finishing a book requires more time than watching the next Marvel movie and more intentional effort than sitting in front of the TV binging the latest season of Stranger Things, but a reader approaching a book for the first time, looking forward to seeing what happens, is still interacting with it in much the same way as a customer at a restaurant. In exchange for a fixed amount of money, the consumer is temporarily satisfied. Even if the meal or book is enjoyable, the satisfaction provided is transient.
The customer returns to the restaurant. The reader buys another book. And on and on the cycle goes.
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with reading for pleasure. A Pew poll from 2012 found that 27% of adults like to read either for entertainment or for escapism, and another 12% read in order to relax. Spending a significant amount of time focused on a book, whether it’s Shakespeare or a middling YA fantasy novel, creates a space apart from the hyper-kinetic chaos of the outside world. Actively engaging with a book is different than scrolling through Twitter or spending five minutes watching ten different Netflix shows, as it demands ruminating on perspectives and situations outside your own instead of looking for brief shots of dopamine. A Harris poll found that an outstanding 81% of adults wish they read more. Reading books, broadly speaking, is a positive and should be encouraged. I’m far from a snob who takes pleasure in telling people the “right way” to read. Yet to blindly accept the consumerist, utilitarian view of how we should engage with books is a missed opportunity. Re-reading encourages us to question that mentality and consider new possibilities for what reading can be.
In Ancient Greece, epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey were not written down and read, but recited in the agora. Citizens didn’t listen to these recitations because they wanted to know whether Odysseus would return to Ithaca. They were interested in the skill of the speaker and the ritual of returning to the journey of Odysseus. These recitations were more similar to the opening ceremonies of the Olympics than to the modern, plot-based conception of narratives. Greek tragedies were similar. These tragedies took familiar stories, like the tales of Oedipus and Orestes, as foundations. Citizens knew these stories, but they flocked to performances in order to return to these stories and see them through the perspective of the playwright.
This is a direct contrast to the modern obsession with new plots containing unexpected twists and surprises. In Hong Kong, a crowd physically assaulted a man who revealed spoilers about Avengers: Endgame. Most anti-spoiler hysteria is thankfully not that intense, but even the idea that a film or book can be “spoiled” if you know major plot details implies that a narrative is valuable because of its plot, and thus experiencing the narrative is of little value if you already know what happens.
There is nothing innately wrong with wanting to be surprised when reading a book. Literary fiction and even non-fiction can surprise and disconcert. Those who willfully reveal what happens to friends or family who don’t want to know are petty individuals. Still, the obsession with wanting others not to discuss what happens in a work, even when that work is years old, borders on the narcissistic, even as it cloaks itself in the language of virtue and selflessness. Yet the main problem with contemporary spoiler hysteria is that it results in a mindset that, in its reduction of a book’s value to its plot, has no conception of why we would read a book after we know its plot.
Jokes are only funny once. Scares and surprises only register once. Even pure entertainment relies to a certain degree on novelty. There are only so many times you can ride on a rollercoaster before it starts losing its charm. Re-reading is valuable because we can return to a book at different times, when we’re in different stages in our lives, and have a different reading experience. Reading Romeo and Juliet in my freshman year of high school, I sympathized wholeheartedly with the young lovers. Coming back to it as a more cynical adult, I pity them but lament their recklessness. Neither of these responses are wrong. They’re both authentic reactions from different stages of life. Literature that relates to emotions and relationships, fears and hopes, provide different experiences depending on when and how they’re read. There’s thus value to re-reading these books that exists outside the consumerist mindset of reading a book to enjoy its plot, then tossing it aside for a newer, shinier book.
Re-reading allows us to engage with the wisdom of works we love. This wisdom is timeless but never static. Reading is a collaborative project between the active mind and the tapestry of words on the page. When the words are inert or the mind slumbers in consumerism, a book has no value beyond the rote conveyance of information or cheap thrills.
The best works are not flat and straightforward. They have hidden, crystalline facets that present themselves variously depending on the emotional state and life experiences of the reader. Re-reading The Great Gatsby in your mid-twenties, for instance, is not a shadow or reflection of reading it as a tempestuous, hormonal high-school sophomore, but an entirely different experience. The value of the most poignant or thoughtful books doesn’t decay as they’re re-read. They constantly surprise us.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and his critical work has been published in The Robert Frost Review. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.