There are so many books. I think we can probably agree on this. Some of us might feel like there are perhaps too many books, but in the interest of agreement: there are so many. More than four million in the United States last year, to offer just one very large number. Even accepting that only a small(ish) fraction of those are books I want to read, it’s a lot of books.
Sometimes, when the inevitable most-anticipated-books lists come out at the start (and middle) of the year, I make my own little sublists of things I want to read. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. LitHub had hundreds of books on their 2026 list. I couldn’t even read the whole list. I want to read Paige Lewis’ Canon. I want to read Sunyi Dean’s The Girl With a Thousand Faces. I want to read Camonghne Felix’s Let the Poets Govern and Adam Phillips’ The Life You Want. I’m pretending the second half of this year doesn’t exist, for now. I can’t look that far ahead.
Also, there’s so much to reread.
This is a lesson I keep having to re-learn. I struggle with rereading. It’s because of all those new books. It is hard to turn my back on the TBR pile—physical, mental, compiled into a spreadsheet, you name it—and commit time to something I’ve read before. But then I do it, and I wonder what’s wrong with me. Rereading isn’t wasting time; it’s not treading too-worn, muddy ground. It’s finding what I didn’t see before, discovering the details and the threads that were hiding, and, sometimes, if I’m really lucky, finding something I didn’t even know about myself.
When I was a young teen, Jo Clayton was probably one of my top three favorite authors (sharing the podium with Tolkien and Le Guin). She comes up here and there in these columns, but I’ve never got into a lot of depth because it’s been decades since I read any of her books. Once upon a time, though, I read her Duel of Sorcery on repeat. (I had no compunction about rereading as a kid. Time was endless! Books were limited!) I spent hours with the green girl Serroi, the powerful beings trying to use her as a pawn, the women warriors, the surly girls and strong girls and magical politics. I don’t remember what happened in those books, but I remember what reading them felt like. I read other Claytons—the Wild Magic series were probably my second favorites—but it was Moongather, Moonscatter, and Changer’s Moon that I would snap up copies of whenever I found them in used bookstores. It was like I was storing them up, just in case.
Earlier this year, I reread Moongather for a podcast. Have you ever gone back to a place you visited years ago and felt, simultaneously, like you knew the lay of the land but had forgotten every detail? It’s familiar and wildly new at once? Rereading Moongather felt like that. There’s a boat sequence that feels almost Earthsea-like. There are forest spirits with shifting genders that are like something out of a Studio Ghibli film. Everything is far more queer than I understood at twelve, and there’s a freedom about sexuality that was entirely missing in so much of what I read all those years ago. Sometimes it’s weird! Interrupting a getaway to deal with a lord trying to make out with the main character is kind of odd! But love takes a lot of shapes in this book. So does power; so does freedom.
It held up, is what I’m saying. I’m always afraid that those books I loved as a kid won’t hold up in the harsher lights of today. It’s not just content—the casual misogyny, racism, homophobia of some older fantasy—but pacing, character, form, sentences. Rhythms. The norms were different. Maybe I liked Clayton so much because her norms and rhythms made sense to me. But it’s hard to know, looking back, what’s gauzy memory and what’s on the page
Last weekend, I reread The Vampire Lestat. If you had asked me, two weeks ago, what happens in this book, I would have said, “Uh … Lestat becomes a rock star?” It’s been decades. The adaptation—Interview with the Vampire turned The Vampire Lestat for the upcoming third season—has been leaning hard on the rock god aspect. So, naturally, that’s what I thought I remembered.
This is where you get to laugh at me if you’ve read Lestat more recently. It is not that. Maybe 30 to 40 pages of the entire 500 page book are Lestat’s rock adventures: a few pages in the beginning, 30 at the very end. It is very rich territory, ready to be expanded from Lestat’s offhand synopsis, in which making a record and writing an autobiography and planning an epic promotional campaign takes mere pages.
But the book is mostly the autobiography. Lestat’s version of things, from the 1700s up to a very brief version of the events of Interview with the Vampire. In Lestat’s mind, he’s the good guy. Literally: upon becoming a vampire, he tries to be a good man. He determines for himself that he doesn’t need God, that goodness can be found in the secular, that beauty matters more. He is a big hot mess of a boy, basically, sheltered and under-educated, who drags himself into the world once he’s a vampire. He’s a theater kid! It is all wonderful. It is not at all what I remembered. Sure, it’s long; sure, it’s overwrought and florid; sure, Lestat spends a lot of time convincing himself and us that he’s doing his best.
No wonder I loved these books so much as a teen. It wasn’t (just) sexy vampires having epic adventures and becoming rock stars; it was deathless drama queens arguing about the nature of evil, rejecting religion, chasing each other around to have impassioned arguments about what it meant to live a good undead life. The only surprising thing is that I stopped reading the Vampire Chronicles after The Tale of the Body Thief. I think maybe it’s time to go back.
Not all books hold up to rereading, to re-discovery at different times in a reader’s life. Not all books hold surprises about the things that have always mattered to us. Serroi’s willfulness, her resistance to control, her love of animals, her self-loathing over her mistakes; Lestat’s questions, his messy, sometimes disastrous manner of figuring his shit out—those things got into my blood. Or they were already there. Rereading, like I said last time I had this repeated rereading revelation, is time travel: going back not just to what you read years ago, but who you were then. But you take yourself with you, right? The image becomes mirrored: Who you were and what you took from a book the first time is reflected in who you are and what you take from the book now.
This all makes me want to work out a formula, a perfect ratio of new books to rereads. I’m pretty certain that doesn’t exist. But I’m also certain that if I could make the time for more of this—for following references down rabbit holes, for picking up old beloved books when new books remind me of them—then maybe I could keep remembering this instead of having to learn it again and again. In the best books, there is always something new to find, and something older that I might have forgotten.
I hesitate to calculate a perfect ratio of new/old books for (re-)reading. I generally just let the world and my mood(s) prompt me. The sf summer conventions are looking back at Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees on the 100th anniversary of its publication, along with Trouble on Triton by Samuel Delany, having its 50th anniversary. I noticed in re-reading Ms. Mirrlees’s famed fantasy that she was pretty sardonic towards her characters, which I had not noticed as much previously. I have to grab Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and see if that is a stone on which she may have sharpened her own literary cutting devices. And I am looking forward to Triton (as we called back in the day), which I recall as a devastating takedown of heroism and the “need” for heroes in either real life or fiction.
I never reread books. There are far too many wonderful unread books on my to-read pile.
Great article, I agree on all the main points.
I do not reread books often any more but every now and then I turn to the small wonders of Banana Yoshimoto when the need arises. It was more than three decades ago when I first read Kitchen and I keep returning to it every few years, as well as to some of her novellas.
I’m a rereader; this year is the first in a very long time where, to date, I’ve only reread one book (funnily enough, Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea). And I’m feeling a bit weird about it; I’m having a good time reading all the new(-to-me) books, but I’m also very aware that I haven’t reread like anything this year, and so there’s an itch in the back of my head.
In terms of books where I discover the things that have always mattered to me: a couple of years ago, I finally got my hands on all of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books, which I had loved as a kid. Upon rereading them, I discovered that the queerness in them had stuck around in my childhood psyche and resonated as an adult.
In terms of books where I discover who I was and what I took from a book the first time reflected in who I am now: I reread His Dark Materials every couple of years and always find something new that I missed the first time. (I still need to pick up The Rose Fields, but I had such a love-hate relationship with The Secret Commonwealth that I haven’t done it yet.)
Oof, I too have a love-hate relationship with the recent Pullman trilogy, and The Rose Field was no exception. There are some really lovely bits, but then there are a zillion dropped plot threads and a frustrating ending. I think it is worth reading, if for nothing other than to get the very bad taste of the end of The Secret Commonwealth out of your head, but I would go in with as few expectations as possible!
Thank you for another lovely and thoughtful article!
I am not a huge re-reader (I have a relatively small and very carefully chosen personal library) but — prompted by the recent Talking Animal essays on this very site — I picked up and re-read Dogs: A Modern Bestiary by Rebecca Brown.
I remembered that it was a bit gay, that there were so many dobermans, that it was odd… and that it immediately went onto my “must own” list but I couldn’t articulate why.
Having now re-read it, this book is full of the most graphic and challenging horrors, is deeply weird, addresses substance abuse in a terrifying manner, is queer to the bone, and can be read (one of many ways) as being primarily about trauma, mental illness and recovery.
Decades ago when I read it, I didn’t identify as disabled, mad or mentally ill. I didn’t know or understand the nature of my trauma or the process of healing from trauma. I really had no idea what I was reading at all. But a part of me saw it *very* clearly and I think re-reading was the best way for me to take in the gift of this book.
It has me very excited to re-read some other books that are just “I love this book” but I’ve never re-read. What will I find out about my younger self, my growth and what parts of me quietly knew, even if I didn’t consciously know them at all?
Oh, and on the topic of perfect ratios: I tend to read an owned book while I’m waiting for my next group of library books to be put aside for me at the library. I’m wondering if I should do this: 1) re-read one owned book 2) the usual three-at-a-time library books 3) read an owned but unread book 4) three more library books… ad infinitum. I do love a pattern! :-)
I feel the same about rereading versus all the unread books out there. It’s like I want to build up a long list of books that are WORTH rereads, and then once I’m finished with all the books in the world, I can go back and spend all my time there. Only of course that’s not going to happen.
I do reread Megan Whalen Turner’s Queen’s Thief series every few years. But there are very few others in that category.
Chalk me up as another person who rarely re-reads, though I did re-read a few Pratchetts in the course of following Reactor’s read-a-long. Ditto the read-a-long of the Vorkosigan series several years ago.
As it happens I was chatting with a friend at Balticon and mused that I should re-read the Zones of Thought series again (Fire Upon the Deep, Deepness in the Sky, and The Children of the Sky). But I also bought a dozen books from Sally Kobee…
This is a constant debate I have with myself. I’m currently re-reading King’s Dark Tower series while filling in some of the connected books I hadn’t read before in between the main DT books. It has been such a joy to return to these characters and pick up on new details. As a parent in my 40s there isn’t as much time for reading as I would like, and I’ve given up on the idea of ever getting through a TBR stack. Just read what you want to read! Rereading a favorite book or series is never a waste of time. Just release any pressure you may be putting on yourself to get to new books. There will always be more to read.
the rereading as a teen thing is so real– i must have read the entire kushiel’s dart trilogy five times, ditto the alanna and immortals quartets, and i used to reread lord of the rings yearly. for awhile a friend and i were thinking of doing a podcast where we reread old favorites and talked about how well they held up, but we quickly realized we’d be spending more time cringing and disappointed than not, lol.