Rereading reveals hidden layers in every story. Explore how returning to familiar books offers comfort and new meaning.
It is no secret that our brains love to learn; humans are born curious. Yet quietly, even if we don’t like to admit it, we sometimes yearn to hold the pages of a book we’ve known before, because we understand the sacred art of rereading.
1. A Deeper Understanding With Every Reread
There is no shame in rereading. Like David Lynch’s surrealistic film Mulholland Drive, sometimes you need a second look at something to understand it fully. The things we learn at the end connect clues from the beginning, and to truly understand it all, we need to start again. Books like I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, where nothing makes sense until the very end, and even then, we’re left wondering.
We cannot help that sometimes we finish reading a page and realize our mind wasn’t exactly present. Rereading helps you notice that little detail you perhaps had missed – a piece of dialogue, a longing stare – that can change the way we view the story and the characters within it. Books were not meant to be read once; their pages were meant to be a little weathered, sentences underlined, kissed with the ghosts of coffee stains.
2. Catching References You Missed Before
Fiction is arguably a reflection of the time in which it was written. The social pressures, the shifting ideologies, and even the historical events. Novels speak volumes without meaning to and can be used to better understand the world in which the author lived. Whilst we may have read a book in our teenage years, we may not have fully understood the history of the time it was published.
Reading a book after time has passed can allow you to have a deeper understanding and collect more references to the world that existed outside the pages. Of course, no one will understand every reference in every book, but rereading usually allows us the opportunity to at least stretch out our new knowledge.
3. The Comfort of Returning to Beloved Stories
In an age of information overload, of an endless choice of series, films, and books, sometimes we prefer to go back to something we know. Our guilty pleasures, our tried-and-trues, that exude the warm comfort of a childhood bed after a long day of school. Most readers of fiction will agree that sometimes a protagonist feels like more than just an imagined character; they were important to us and the people we grew into.
People often forget to acknowledge how influential books are on our development, how certain characters may teach us to be courageous, clever, or kind. Feeling heard and understood is such an important and rare moment in a person’s life, and it should be held onto.
When a piece of literature makes a person feel recognized, then it only makes sense for it to be read over and over again. If we have moments where we forget ourselves, then we can turn to the books that saw us when no one else did. Even when our world does not feel safe, when every day brings more breaking news, reading can become our solace.
It can sweep us away from this land of the unknown and surround us with a world we have been before, a world that does not ask anything of us except to enjoy.
4. Rereading as a Journey Through Memory
Books are good for you, for your brain, and even your personal development. That is why, in high school, we are made to read the classics, the types of books that challenge a growing mind and even a grown mind. We read them, or at least said that we did, and got the summary of it from a friend, but didn’t let the words sink in.
No matter how hard you try, you may just not be at the right time in your life to understand a certain piece of art. It is only upon revisiting it that we have the life experience to grasp what was really going on. More importantly, rereading a book from long ago gives us an insight into something even greater: ourselves.
5. Discovering How We’ve Changed Through Rereading
It is often through reading that we discover who we truly are and which characters we relate to. Oscar Wilde once said that “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim“. Here, Wilde suggests that perhaps our interpretation of a piece of art should reveal more about us than it reveals about the artist. Picking up a book we once read when we were a different version of ourselves may reveal a lot about the changes we have made since then. Do we feel the same?
Have we outgrown some of the characters? Do we understand more deeply the conflicts within? Unlike what some will have you believe, people do change, but usually on such a small, gradual basis that it slips by them unnoticed. Rereading provides a kind of mirror, a gateway into being able to see all the progress we have made from the earlier versions of ourselves, and it serves as a reference that there will be more progress to come.
Final Thoughts: The Art of Rereading Books
Rereading is not just a ‘guilty pleasure’ but an art known only by those who practice it. We have our whole lives to discover new books, but rereading provides gateways into ourselves only accessible through the worn pages of our favorite books.
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Vincent Phan
Vincent is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 1000 Libraries Magazine. He is a Paris-born ex-corporate turned bookseller and philosopher, on a global mission to spread the joy of physical books in our age of digital technology.
