2026 has become a bit of a year for rereading books for me. Not intentionally. Not exclusively. However, a few things happened which have each driven me towards reading stuff I have already read.
Koji Suzuki’s passing was part of it. In honor of the recently late author, I did a deep dive reading of his short story collection Dark Water (note: there will be spoilers, but I had fun writing that). Since then I started rereading his Ring series.
I got the manga adaptation of Yukito Ayatsuji’s Decagon House Murders and read it all in an extended sitting. While not a perfect re-read, it still follows the story relatively precisely enough it felt like it.
There the whole to-do with watching Albert Campion: Sweet Danger and then exploring the oddities of the available Campion ebooks. I went back and read Sweet Danger at that time.
I had a sudden inkling to go back and try and recall my fandom of Christopher Moore which lead to rereading Practical Demonkeeping and Island of the Sequined Love Nun [while I enjoyed both ok, especially the former, it seems like I might not have become such a fan if I read him the first time this year].
I have even gone back and relistened to the audiobooks of the first three Dungeon Crawler Books after only reading those earlier this year.
And currently I am going back through Phil Rickman’s Curfew which may have been my first book read from him (I don’t remember) and enjoying myself. Before that, I reread the very short first book in the Cherringham series before starting to go back through that series.
All told, it is already around 1/3 of my total reading of the year and there are others I would like to revisit. Good Omens, perhaps. Darkest Part of the Woods. Maybe some Philip K. Dick. Could be fun to go back through some manga.
Some of it is because I had such a long stretch, nearly a decade, of being distanced from my reading life. Getting back into reading is very nice but there’s a sense of being dislocated a bit and using a few key works are helping to me realign.
I’ve been wondering what other people think about rereading. Seems like it once had to be the default. A personal library the size of my own is a rarity and even then if I stopped adding new books and just read what I had for the rest of my life I’d have to no doubt reread several volumes a few times to fill the gaps. Historically, the situation would have been tighter. Even with access to a public library, people would no doubt have had to reread books a few times unless they were in a particularly large city with lots of access to new texts.
Plus, it’s fun. Even tossing out Nabokov’s “no reading, only rereading” quote it is kind of nice how a well-known book is a map of an explored trail. First time through, you are probably looking down for loose rocks and looking around for trail markings. As you walk a trail again and again, you get to a point where you can feel the differences in the seasons. You can recall how the stream is full one year but empty the next. It might not hold the shock of truly new discovery but it holds something different: subtle discovery. If, and this is important, if it is a good trail to walk.
Which, I suppose, is exactly what Nabokov was on about.
I tried to look up some information about folks and attitudes on rereading, including a dive into more academic literature, and there are some nuggets there though the more academic side made me roll my eyes a good bit because it felt like some authors couldn’t be bothered to reread their own tedious papers. Stuff I saw had some folks talking about the importance of rereading. About the enjoyment. Revisiting old favorites like old friends. Some folks having a yearly re-read plan: especially certain big books of their youth. People talking about finding out new things each time.
One person even argued the Philosophy 101 argument that rereading is impossible because each time you read a book, you find something new. I…kind of like that.
Reading a book is an event where the author (and editor, and publisher, and typesetter, and all of them) meet the reader at a particular place in their lives. A two-body system where each body is part of the whole.
A person bitter over a divorce will read a book differently than a person newly married. Particular jobs and particular children and particular whatevers can all flavor reactions to plot points and characters. Just age. All that. Unless you live a fairly monotonous life, chances are you will have new eyes when you look at old pages.
Don’t get me wrong, though, the statement is academic twaddle. There is 100% a thing as re-reading. Calm down Heraclitus. It’s the same damned river. It’s just a different version of it.1
Around my bookstore days, 2007ish, at the early shouts of the Social Media Revolution [more like de-evolution, amirite!? wink wink…etc], whenever people complained to me about rereading it was always in a broader context of detesting spoilers. Not sure what was up back then, but folks had a thing about spoilers for sure.
Now reading through some of those posts about why people don’t reread, it seems to be largely in the context of “there’s so much to read” with a minor addendum of “I don’t read much to begin with” in a few spots.
One bookblogger I found says that there is a pressure to always be reading something new because of the public nature of their reading habits. I think that tracks a bit, but is also a bit sad. What is essentially the public face of reading in the post-apocalyptic wasteland aftermath of the aforementioned Social Media Revolution is required by nature of their existence to always be caught up in the new thing. Sure, stuff like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves will be rediscovered every few months by someone who seems to try and claim a special ownership of it but overall The New™ drives content. A second two-body system in our existing two-body system. The Reader + The Author entwined with the The Reader’s Public Persona + The Reader’s Public Persona’s Audience.
Some of it is faff, of course. Another chunk of twaddle. There are too many books for you to read. Yes, you. I’m talking to you. At best we can merely find the books that we find. Lady Luck is another body in our ever-growing complexity of orbits.
None of this is to yuck anyone’s yum. Read. Don’t read. Reread. Just buy books to put on a shelf so guests can feel amazed. Whichever meets you where you are.
The you that was here five seconds ago.
Now gone.
And another…
