I have done before, but not often. I’ll reread something if I can remember enjoying it but can’t remember why

There are some books I read every five years or so. Every new read resonates differently and kind of helps me figure out where I'm at now. I just feel them so much. They're:

• Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
• Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjian
• The Abyss - Marguerite Yourcenar
• Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges

I reread great books frequently, good books occasionally, and mediocre to poor books not at all. But I'm lucky: although I have a great memory, I can reread a book and get as much enjoyment or more from it as the first time.

Pretty much every single Disc World novel by the late and great Sir Terry Pratchett, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, Barry Hughart's 3 Master Li novels, Detective Dee/Judge Dee by Robert van Gulik, Martha Wells excellent Murderbot novels, Marie Andreas fun Lost Ancients series, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and more.
Some of these give me great comfort (Terry Pratchett) and some are just amazingly well written.

I know they're not the only ones, but the only books I recall reading more than once are Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth and it's first sequel World Without End. I haven't read the second sequel or the prequel yet, though.

I reread books all the time. I have several I go back to regularly from my preteen/teen years. It's like watching a movie from your childhood, lol, nostalgic and comfortable. I always pick up new/forgotten tidbits .

@TimTheEnchanter the only book(s) I re-read is The Lord of the Rings.

Yes, but rarely enough that the instances stand out in my mind. I've read LOTR a couple of times, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Martian by Andy Weir, a textbook called Art and Visual Perception because I am a fucking nerd. It's very likely that I'll read Midnight in Chernobyl again, Spillover by David Quammen (predicted the Covid pandemic 10 years early!), and anything by Erik Larson or James Gleick. Those books are great.

But LOTR is the only fiction I've ever read more than once

generally: no, unless they have something worth repeatedly highlighting or internalizing. i think this is mostly a function of being a non-fiction reader, though, where re-reading wouldn't typically be a thing you do for pleasure so much as retaining the information at all and synthesizing it with other stuff.

When I was a kid I read Harry Potter 6 times forward and once backwards (going chapter by chapter starting with book 7)

Now it's hard to justify rereading a book when there are so many books on my reading list (and on my shelf) that I haven't read yet.

Though I have read HPMoR twice because I was going to recommend it to someone but wanted to check if it was as good as I remembered. Read the first few chapters and then got sucked in and read the whole thing.

Back before the Internet was really a thing I would sometimes reread some of the few favorite books that I owned. Like a lot of other posters, LotR was a staple though I did find myself skipping through the parts where things got slow. Jurassic Park and the Lost World were another set that I enjoyed every time through.

When I was much younger, I read all of the star wars books that I could get my hands on. A few years after I had stopped reading them, I randomly got bored and decided to check what new stuff had come out. I picked one out and got about 3/4 through before realizing that it was not a new book and that I had read it before. So much for retention!

There are a few books I like to relive every now and then. For me, it's a guilty pleasure, to be honest. Wish I could do it more often, and for more books.

The ones that come to mind are Little Brother, by mr. Doctorow, Sandman by mr. Gaiman (mostly the Death chapters) and... Let's see... Ah, yes, Neuromancer, because I'm a sucker for mainstream books, and that's the one that got me through life.

Sometimes! My favourite series I've reread twice. Which at nearly 50 books (at the time) was quite the endeavour.

I like to reread a loved series/book between reading other things. It helps keep me from getting in a reading slump.

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Yes, I reread them and take notes. After many years of being an active reader I've realized that it doesnt matter how many books you read, but how many books you read well and what you can recall from them further on that can bring meaningful context to new contents or situations.

Yep, totally do. I'm usually on the lookout for something new, but I have no fault with rereading a book when the mood comes up. A lot of my reasons seem to line up with yours: it can be a good decompressor, the novelty kinda returns after a while, certain books are Comfort Books. Besides that, I think there's already a default understanding for games being replayed and TV and movies being rewatched. Why does reading have to be any different if I don't want it to be 😅?

There's also the utility in doing so with textbooks or literature I read for professional reasons. Sure, manuals focused on tech rather than practices and technique might not be as evergreen, but even tech specific manuals often have specific strategies that could be worth taking the time to get a reminder of. Just gotta make sure that information is indeed still applicable and hasn't been deprecated somehow.

Honestly, I Have yet to try such thing. Partially, because I have always something new to read, but hmm... Maybe I will try doing so later. Who knows, might be fun :D

Never did for novels, but I often re-read light novels, manga and artbooks.

I only reread, when reading a book to a child. Otherwise rereading is very rare for me.

I do like to read some very generic fantasy genres, like for example Isekais/Portal Fantasies or fan fictions. Novels in that area are so similar to each other, you may as well count that as reading the same thing over and over again. Each novel has its own twists and strengths though, so it always feels fresh.

Constantly. I read Harry Potter every year (despite any misgivings I have about the author), lately to my kid before putting them down to sleep.

The God of Small Things, LoTR, the Hobbit, Dune, the Foundation series, the Nightrunner series (by Lynn Flewelling), the Left Hand of Darkness. One of my favorite things to do is to reread novels I loved as a child and see if they held up.

Reading a book again, you notice things you've forgotten or missed. And you've changed as a person, so your understanding is different every time.