Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would take me to the library and every single time I would check out the maximum number of books (thirty)1, read them all, return them within the two-week checkout period, and check out another 30.
At some point, maybe in college, I started re-reading books I’d already read, although only rarely, and most of the books I read were in fact “new” ones I’d never read. This is still the case, but increasingly I find myself going back to older books more frequently, and I believe this is a trend that will continue, although I hope I never get to a point where I refuse to read anything new.
Same thing I just said in graph form
In addition to reading a lot, I used to track all the books I read and publish very short reviews with ratings of said books on my website, which I then exported to Goodreads at some point, but then I kind of realized that not everything has to be social media-ified and seeing other people’s negative reviews of books kind of took some of the joy out of the things I enjoyed that weren’t well-reviewed. (I was also skeptical about staying on the platform after it was acquired by Amazon for reasons I won’t get into here today, but you can probably guess.)
It also started to feel performative for me to publicly track what I was reading, and it became a bit Hawthorne effect-y2 (not so severe that I ONLY read books because I knew people were watching, but, because I knew I was being observed to some degree, I can’t be sure that I DIDN’T change my behavior because of it) and there are a lot of books I technically have read but honestly can’t remember much of other than my gut reaction, and I certainly couldn’t hold a conversation about those books today. Even reading my OWN reviews (that came from my OWN brain and were typed by my OWN hands3) is not helpful to jog my memory in some cases (oy). Also, some of them go back almost 20 years, and I was definitely a different person with different opinions and a more limited perspective back then.
Anyway, one of the benefits of re-reading some books I’ve already read is that it helps reinforce the memory of what I read the first time, or give me a new perspective. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction which is very amenable to this approach. I also have a much lower threshold to abandon a book partway if I’m not really connecting with it, after reframing it in my mind not as abandonment but just a pause for now (whereas in the past I would have just tried to barrel through to say I’ve read it).
I did recently migrate my Goodreads data to Literal because I do love tracking and documenting things. I also tried The Storygraph which I thought was pretty good but I really wanted a service where I could play around with the API, and unfortunately the founder isn’t prioritizing that right now, which is totally fair (sounds like it was one-person show for a long time). I really appreciated that they shared that context when they certainly didn’t have to.
Currently I’m re-reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi4, which apparently I rated 3 stars in 2019, but am giving another chance for the aforementioned reasons and also I want to jumpstart myself into finding flow states in my own life again, so I have very high expectations of this book this time around to solve all my problems 😄.
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Obviously I wasn’t reading 30 epic novels or anything, more like 30 Baby-Sitters Club books with some Roald Dahl sprinkled in. But it was still a lot of books. ↩︎
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Now I’ve said OWN too many times that all I can see is “Oprah Winfrey Network”. ↩︎
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…which is a really great name because his first name is embedded in his last name (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). That would be like if my name were Rachel Kwonracheli. ↩︎