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| Photo credit: jamelah on Flickr |
Largely because of my never-ending TBR list (and not-so-infinite allotted time), I don’t re-read quite as much as I used to. And yet, I’ve recently met some people who frequently re-read novels five or six times (sometimes in a row!) and it got me thinking about why we re-read and re-watch and re-consume our favorite media.
I mean, from an outsider perspective, one might think it’d be a little boring to re-read something—after all, don’t you already know what’s going to happen? But as anyone who’s ever re-read a favorite book can tell you, you come out of every reading with something a little different. You notice things on the second and third and fourth readings that you hadn’t picked up on the first time. The nuances become more clear, the foreshadowing obvious, the character development easier to understand.
That, and re-living a favorite book, quite frankly, can be a lot of fun.
Nowadays, the main reason I re-read books is to remember what happened before I dive into the sequel, so I can pick up on the nuances and references from the previous book without pausing to try to wrack my brain to remember what happened. This, of course, really only applies to when there’s been a decent amount of time between the reading of book one and book two, but I find that it really does help me fully understand the sequel.
That being said, I don’t re-read every book before picking up the sequel, especially if it’s a particularly long book (City of Lost Souls, for example? Probably not going to get a re-read before I pick up City of Heavenly Fire, even if I did enjoy it. Which I did). Mostly because of the aforementioned time constraints and mountainous TBR list.
But I’m curious. Do you re-read books? Often? Sometimes? Three or five times?
Twitter-sized bite:
Do you re-read books? Often? At all? Several times over? Join the discussion on @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)
