Re-Reading for Fun and Profit

The Dune section of my bookshelves

Once upon a time I rarely re-read anything. After all, life is short and my to-read list is long.

But at some point I changed my mind about that, both in fiction and philosophy. I still only re-read a small fraction of the books I read (life is getting shorter all the time), but I am much more likely to do so than I once was. In some ways, I think this is partly a result of getting older. Maybe life is too short to read bad books, and if I choose to re-read something it's usually because I either enjoyed it the first time or didn't understand it but got the sense that there was something valuable to be understood.



Re-reading is par for the course for any teacher of humanities (the "for profit" part of re-reading for me, such as it is). As one of my professors once said, in the humanities we read books and think things about them. That's what we do. And this almost always requires reading more than once. I've probably read Plato's Republic (or most of it) at least ten times. And I get something new from it every time. The same with many early Buddhist texts or certain texts of figures I work on like Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, or Jayarāśi (check out my book!). I always look forward to re-reading philosophers like Zhuangzi or Spinoza, although for somewhat different reasons.

When it comes to fiction, I've re-read the Dune series (yes, even the later books!) three or four times. I particularly enjoy re-reading some of the copies I've had for decades (see the picture above).

My recent forays into teaching fiction from a philosophical angle have afforded me a good reason to re-read favorites like Frankenstein, Pet Sematary, The Ballad of Black Tom, Kindred, The Just City, The Left Hand of Darkness, Binti, and The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

There are many books I look forward to re-reading. Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is definitely in the didn't-understand-but-could-tell-was-brilliant camp. At least one re-reading seems well worthwhile--when I have the time and energy for it, anyway! I recently got unexpectedly obsessed with Stephen King's Dark Tower series. The Tower is calling to me for a re-read soon (maybe as a treat to myself next summer, or sooner if I can't wait). And while we're talking Stephen King, I haven't read The Stand since I was a teenager. I feel that Captain Tripps is coming back for me soon. And the new IT movies make me want to re-read that other massive King tome.

Re-reading Octavia Butler's Kindred recently planted the (Earth) seed for re-reading some of her other works. I may need to re-read The Lord of the Rings again in the near future after re-watching some of the movies recently. Although Orson Scott Card is problematic as a person, I think I need to re-read the later books in the Ender series, especially Speaker for the Dead, which had a huge effect on me in my younger days. If there really is going to be a Foundation TV series (starring Jared Harris of Mad Men and Chernobyl fame), I may have to re-read Asimov's Foundation series again, even though I just re-read it six years ago.

But why is re-reading sometimes a good thing?

Obviously part of it is re-experiencing books that you love or that affect you in some way. But I don't think re-reading is always mere nostalgia.

Here's what I said after reading Kindred for the third time.

My third time through this novel has me appreciating Butler's brilliance even more. Her prose, while sparse, unearths complexities and horrors more viscerally than more convoluted prose often does. This time I'm reflecting on the brilliance of using time travel to explore the ties between contemporary Americans and our history, a swirling mass of abject horrors and unfulfilled ideals. Butler puts flesh on the bones of our history, asking us to confront the human face of its horrors, the legacies of which still haunt us today. I thought this was a profoundly philosophical novel before, but reading it for the third time makes me see that it's also the kind of novel that transforms its readers, asking us to think and feel things we may not have thought or felt before.

It's not so much that I didn't notice some of these things at all before, but they took a couple re-reads to sink in. Also, you always focus on different things every time. A re-read is never the same as the initial read. And this is a good thing. This is the fun and profit of re-reading, although the "profit" in this case is in beauty and wisdom.

For example, re-reading Frank Herbert's Dune in my late 30's was a different experience than reading it for the first time when I was 15 or the second time in my mid-20's, because I was a different person each time. As an adult, it was much more obvious to me that Paul is not a hero, but a tragic figure (having read the sequels also makes this clear). I also noticed that Jessica is by far the most interesting character in the book. Here's what I said about it in my Goodreads review.

[Jessica] has far more thoughtful trepidation about the terrible things she does than anyone else (everyone does some terrible things, but with varying amounts of reflection).  Also, every time I read it, I'm more ambivalent (as was, I think, Herbert) about whether the exploits of Muad'Dib are a good thing, which is a theme that comes up in the sequels.

I look forward to re-reading Dune again in my 40's to see what else I might experience.

But enough about me! I have a huge stack of books to re-read! What do you think? Why do you re-read books?