Re: Re-reading

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.

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 😄.