bringing our favorite books back from the dead

Imagine: you’re reading a book and absolutely loving it. You can barely convince yourself to put it down. But horror strikes; you take a glance at how much of the book you have left, and you are very close to finishing the novel. You want to savor it, take your time with it, but you can’t stop yourself from wanting to know how it all will end. I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself in this position many times. I get closer and closer to the end, and I’m torn between gobbling up the last few pages, and trying to keep the book going as long as I can. But ultimately, books come to an end. Series’ come to an end. Sometimes it feels like losing a friend.

So what can a reader do when a favorite book comes to an end? Enter the art of the reread. There are so many benefits of rereading, and yet, in today’s obsession with grind culture and meeting goals and the highest number of books read in one year, rereading is sometimes frowned upon, or feels ‘wasteful.’ But how can time be wasted, if it was spent in a way that made you feel good?

One thing I love about rereading is the ability to notice details and lovely moments that I may have missed the first time around. Sometimes when I get excited while reading, I’ll catch myself reading so quickly that I miss details or don’t cherish a line as much as I could. If I’m not loving the book to begin with, that’s not the end of the world. When I’m really loving a book, though, I want to really cherish it and enjoy it, and yet I also want to keep going, going, going. When I close the book, I’m glad to have had the whole story seared into my mind, but it also feels like a letdown. With a reread, I can re-enter the world I loved, capture my favorite moments again, and really savor them.

Additionally, in a world bogged down with single-use products, flippancy, and impermanence (is anyone else bothered by how little we are able to own and keep, as opposed to just have a subscription for???) rereading allows us to make use of our book trophies and use our ‘stuff.’ Having walls of bookshelves that are stuffed to the gills with books and stories that we’ve loved is wonderful, and though I’m not a fan of minimalism, why hold on to stacks and stacks of books you don’t plan to touch ever again? I want to own a copy of the stories I’ve loved, but I don’t want them to sit closed, collecting dust. I want to enjoy the stories I love, and that means taking the time to sit with them again.

There are so many novels already published, and so many more that come out each week, that there will never be enough time to read them all. It can feel overwhelming to look at a TBR stack as tall as yourself and wonder when you’ll get around to the books. But reading is not a race, and there is nothing wrong with returning to stories you’ve already loved. Stories do not have to be single-use products; we can return over and over again to the books we love most, and keep them with us again and again.