Again! Again!

Some people think it's weird that I read books more than once. "You already know what's gonna happen," they say, "why read it again?" In response, I don't understand their attitude. I say, if I enjoyed it the first time, who's to say I won't enjoy it a second time through? Or a third?

The read-it-once philosophy seems to come from a belief that the only pleasure you can get out of a book is purely plot-related. You read a book to "find out what happens" and then, once you've done that, you get on with your life. Except that the plot is almost never the reason I read a book. There are only a few stories whose whole point is the ending. And even then, even with, say, a whodunit, it's worth reading a second time. Take an Agatha Christie story: you read it, and then you find out at the end who the murderer was. And then you read it again to see if all the clues actually add up.

Besides, there's more to a book than plot. There's aesthetic enjoyment in reading words put in a particular order. Yes, there is! I'm not crazy! If a book is suffiently entertaining on a page-by-page basis, it doesn't really matter if the story goes anywhere. And if I enjoy reading the words once, I'll probably enjoy it again.

The people who stare blankly at me when I say I'm "rereading" a book will, from time to time, listen to a song more than once. And there's much less information in a song than in a book. Am I wrong about this? You don't look at a painting once and then wander away, never to look again, do you?

I'd say I read most books at least twice. Unless it's a book I really dislike, and even then I'll often give it another chance. Like, I didn't like Atlas Shrugged the first time I read it. And now I'm rereading it, and I still don't like it. I can't believe I'm spending so much time on this damn book, seriously. It's a good thing I read really fast, or I'd have lost months of my life in this one book. And yet, I don't consider my time wasted.

I think it's partly an economic measure. If I only read books once, I'd need to buy two or three times as many, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't survive that. But if each book gets multiple runthroughs, I save a lot of money. Well, until I've read a book so many times that the cover comes off; then I incur a certain amount of expense in the form of tape.