Are there any books you re-read frequently?

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

i've reread the bastille storming chapter of a tale of two cities on the last three bastille days.

neuromancer tilogy and the idoru trilogy and the various iain m banks books used to be quite regularly reread but since i got an ereader this has stopped. can't think of the last thing i reread.

(far from the madding crowd according to my records, 32 years between readings... return of the native, ditto.)

I do find myself staring at my library in a semi-trance state (usually while waiting for my son to finish taking a bath). I guess I keep books around for the reasons suggested - either to re-read them at leisure or loan them out - although I would add a third which is also that I like having stuff around for my kids to look through. It doesn't happen super-often but occasionally my daughter will express an interest in something (like my Smithsonian History of Newspaper Comics) and then I get to spend an hour reading Popeye or Little Nemo with her or whatever. And currently she's reading the copy of the Hobbit that I read when I was her age. So I enjoy this kind of "family curator" role, which includes being able to go to a shelf and look up stuff when asked about yiddish or ancient Rome or WWII or something.

I also partly feel preservationist about certain things, like the sf/fantasy stuff + comics. Preserving for who? idk. for stuff that brought me so much joy I feel some kind of weird obligation to protect and preserve them, like I owe it to these authors that never got their due in pay or respect.

I think it was Herman Hesse who asked the question about (I'm paraphrasing) whether it was 'better to read seven books once, or one book seven times'. I'm somewhere in the middle, but the older I get I'm more inclined towards the latter.

Unless that book is by Dan Brown or JK Rowling