Do you reread books?  I rarely do now. As a child, I would read my favorites over and over. I can remember reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Stuart Little multiple times. Later, in adolescence, I read and reread The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, The Catcher in the Rye, and several of Kurt Vonnegut’s books. I did the same thing with movies; I’d watch the ones I loved again and again. But in adulthood, I don’t generally reread a book (or rewatch a movie), even if I loved the experience of reading/seeing it the first time. There are so many books on my to-read list, and more published every year, that spending time rereading a book seems foolish, and more foolish the older I get. In my 60s now, I see my time on Earth as shrinking and finite – closer to the finish line than the starting gate – and I’d like to fill the remaining years with new experiences, not reruns.

Instead of rereading a book I loved, I often look for another book by the same author that I haven’t read, and read that instead. Instead of rereading Pride and Prejudice, I read Persuasion. Instead of rereading Crime and Punishment, I read The Brothers Karamazov. Instead of rereading The Red and the Black, I read The Charterhouse of Parma.  And so on.

That being said, there are, as always, exceptions to the general rule. As a younger adult, I reread some gigantic novels that moved me tremendously, including the book that I always cite as my “favorite” when forced to choose: Herman Melville’s kaleidoscopic masterpiece Moby Dick.  I may even read that remarkable book one more time. Books like Moby Dick and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow are so dense and complex that reading them again can be an entirely new experience with its own rewards.  I imagine that some inveterate rereaders out there feel that way about lots of books, but for me it is only a select few.

In recent years (this year particularly), I have reread books that I first read as a much younger person because I wanted to see them through my much older, more experienced eyes. My first encounter with Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was in 6th grade, when my appreciation for the brilliance of this foundational text of biological science was limited by my youth and inexperience. Reading the book again a few years ago, after taking many biology classes in college and keeping up on developments in biology through popular science reading, including a two-volume biography of Darwin, gave me a much more in-depth understanding. (In fact, two of the other nonfiction books on my list of reread books are also biology-related. I’m fascinated by how life evolved into the diverse world of the present.)

I also reread books by William Faulkner and Herman Hesse that I first read for high school English courses. I found that the intervening years had only deepened my appreciation for Faulkner’s themes and style, while my older self found Hesse less profound than teenaged me.

This year, I also reread James Joyce’s Ulysses, which I first read 16 years ago. I had always planned to read it again, and, as with the first time, I used an excellent readers’ guide to shepherd me through the difficult prose. I loved (and understood) the book even more on the second reading. Ulysses, it seems to me, is a book that provides the rereader with multiple rewards, as it reveals more of its layers and references each time I encounter it.

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that my personal list of books I’ve reread as an adult (at least those I can remember) is a short one, with only a dozen entries. The following list is presented in chronological order by date of publication and includes the dates of the first and second times I read each book:

1. Moby Dick (1851) – Herman Melville (1^st time 1983, 2^nd time 1990s)
2. The Origin of Species (1859) – Charles Darwin (1^st time 1973, 2^nd time 2022)
3. Sons and Lovers (1913) – D.H. Lawrence (1^st time 1985, 2^nd time 1990s)
4. Ulysses (1922) – James Joyce (1^st time 2010, 2^nd time 2026)
5. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) – Virginia Woolf (1^st time 1980s, 2^nd time 2000s)
6. The Sound and the Fury (1929) – William Faulkner (1^st time 1976, 2^nd time 2026)
7. The Glass Bead Game (1946) – Herman Hesse (1^st time 1978, 2^nd time 2000s)
8. Waiting for Godot (1953) – Samuel Beckett (1^st time mid-1970s, 2^nd time 2000s)
9. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) – Thomas Pynchon (1^st time 1983, 2^nd time 1990s)
10. A History of the Christian Church (1918, revised 1985) – Williston Walker, et al. (1^st time 1990s, 2^nd time 2000s)
11. Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth (1997)– Richard Fortey (1^st time 1998, 2^nd time 2010s)
12. Life on a Young Planet: The First Three Billion Years of Evolution on Earth (2003) – Andrew Knoll (1^st time 2004, 2^nd time 2010s)