Multiple Re-reads

 

Thinking about how I’m currently traversing my third go-round with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, I began musing on how many other multiple re-reads I’d done.

 

First off, it’s good to re-read a good book; it’s an excellent idea to re-read an excellent book. The better the book, the more profitable a re-read should be. For the longest time, say, from about 2000 to 2020, I had little interest in re-reading books, save for childhood faves. Instead I cast as far and wide a net as possible, especially the years when I fancied myself an up-and-coming slash potential author. Occasionally I would do deep dives into certain authors’ bibliographies. But since the Wu Flu, I’ve kinda grown disgusted and dissatisfied with a lot of stuff out there. Most of the stuff out there. So much so that if it’s a nonfiction topic I’m exploring and it’s at all possible, I choose something before 1980. Something before 1965’s even better. Less chance the material is infected by certain mind viruses. This feeling applies equally to the fiction that I’ve tentatively considered of late.

 

That’s one reason why re-reads are a great idea. Another is the nostalgia factor – what were you doing, feeling, being when you first encountered the particular book. What was going on peripherally in your life. Yet another is the technical knowledge you’d reinforce if we’re talking nonfiction, and the degree you’d assimilate literary technique if it’s fiction in front of you. Yet another factor, similar, is that books meet you where you are. You change, and the book changes to meet you. Wonderful books I’ve read as a kid failed to leave an impression on me as an adult; some books that were meh to me as a young man floored me in my middle ago; and vice versa. Still another reason is that you always – always – see something new and exciting in later re-reads. Something fresh and different always jumps out at you. Like revisiting a classic film periodically throughout the years.

 

Why would you only see Paris, the Grand Canyon, or the Alaskan glaciers once and only once if you had the means and opportunity? Do we not speak to our friends on a regular basis? Even better for long-lost ones, to re-connect? If we enjoy skiing, biking, playing tennis, chess, you name it, we never just do it once and say, “Well, that was fun. Never again. I’ll just savor the memory.” Just so with re-reading.

 

All right, enough of that. That’s where my headspace is at the moment. I wholeheartedly encourage you to re-read the great books you have read earlier in your life. Trust me, it’s worth it.

 

What have I re-read multiple times?

 

I’m such a reading nerd that I have been tracking all the books I’ve read over the course of my life. Currently, give or take a dozen or so forgotten in the fog of age, I’ve read just shy of 1,300 books over just shy of 50 years.

 

92 of those books I’ve read more than once. That’s only 7 percent.

 

Of those re-reads, care to guess which one book I’ve read the most?

 

Easy. Lord of the Rings. I’ve read the trilogy five times (last time being 2021). But technically, the book I’ve read the most is The Fellowship of the Ring, at six times, since I revisited it in the summer of 1994 but did not proceed to the other books in The Lord of the Rings (band, college, and a girlfriend all conspired to make it difficult to continue).

 

Two books I’ve read four times each:

   The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells (once as a kid in the 70s, then again in the 90s, in 2015 as an audiobook, and finally for Halloween 2023).

   The Life of Christ, by Bishop Fulton Sheen (once in the late 90s, and then three times [!] in 2015)

 

Nine books I’ve read three times each:

   The Hobbit, by Tolkien

   Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

   Watership Down, by Richard Adams

   and then five science fiction paperbacks –

      Red Planet, by Robert Heinlein

      To Die in Italbar, by Roger Zelazny

      The Grayspace Beast, by Gordon Eklund

      The Colors of Space, by Marion Zimmer Bradley

      The Spinner, by Doris Piserchia

      Red Tide, by D. D. Chapman and Deloris Lehman Tarzan

 

The remaining 80 or so read only twice are too numerous to list, but I will note the ones that I could see another future re-read, pushing them into the vaunted and respected “Threepeat” category:

 

   The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien

   The Children of Hurin, by J.R.R. Tolkien

   The Inferno, by Dante

   Watch the Skies!, by Curtis Peebles

   A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

   Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

   Conquerors from the Darkness, by Robert Silverberg

   Foucault’s Pendulum, by Umberto Eco

   In Dubious Battle, by John Steinbeck

 

Not sure what my next re-read will be, but I have an omnibus edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams behind me as I write this; that seems to be probably the finest candidate at the moment (it would be a second re-read, my first encounter with them being the late 80s).