I treat reading like a competitive sport. It’s a little silly considering that the only person I compete against is myself, and there really is no benefit except for the dopamine rush I get from seeing the progress bar of my Goodreads yearly challenge fill up, but it makes me happy, and that’s what matters. I tend to be picky about what and how I read—I know the genres I like and the ones I have a harder time getting into, the perfect speed to listen to an audiobook (depends on the narrator, but usually around 2.5x), and my personal requirements for a book to achieve a perfect five-star rating. For a long time, I also knew that the speed with which I progressed through books meant that I couldn’t always go super in depth with them. Show me the cover of any book I’ve read or listened to in the last year, and more than likely, I can give a quick overview and highlight a few key scenes, but the specifics get muddled, and the author’s writing style is hard to conjure, even if it wowed me at the time. This is where rereading enters the scene.
I like to let at least a year pass before I intentionally seek out a book I’ve already read. I gravitate towards ones that I had a great experience reading and want to refresh my memory of, but occasionally, I’ll revisit one that I had mixed feelings about or wasn’t the biggest fan of. Sometimes, my personal circumstances at the time of my first listen influence my opinion of a book. For example, I listened to Sally Rooney’s Normal People at the beginning of the pandemic, when I was a college freshman and had only recently transitioned from reading mostly young adult novels to adult novels. For reasons that escape me now that I’ve reread it, I wasn’t a fan of the characters or the plot and gave it two stars. On my second listen almost two years later, I had a new view of the world that translated to a newfound appreciation for the characters and their experiences, and my rating jumped to five stars.
For a long time, I resisted relistening to audiobooks I had finished because those hours could be spent exploring a new literary universe with unfamiliar characters and plotlines. But I’ve found that my familiarity with the book’s essential details makes the listening experience go by a lot quicker while the amount of time that has passed since my initial read keeps things fresh. More than anything, I’ve found that rereading helps me focus more on the enjoyment of reading than the urgency of increasing the number of books I can get through in a given amount of time. It’s almost a meditative experience because of how often I find myself reflecting on not only the content of the book, but who I was at the time I first read it and how I’ve changed since then. While there will always be more books I want to add to my TBR list than I can possibly get to in a lifetime, revisiting ones I’ve already finished is such a rewarding experience.