On rereading books

Susan Sontag

"No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading," Susan Sontag said. Do I agree? Well, yes and no.

Yes

I used to say something similar: "Any book worth reading is worth keeping." I said that to justify having more than 5,000 books in my home. I believed it then and I would believe it now if I were younger and still had room for that many books.

But why keep books one has already read? Because they inspire memories, because they can be handy references for someone who writes about books and because they are worth rereading. I have reread many books, sometimes with more pleasure the second or third time than the first time. Good books, like good movies, reward you for revisiting them.

Books require much more time than movies, however. Even to read them once takes hours out of our lives. And so we might ask, why read them even once if they are not worth reading again?

No

Yet time is short and books are plentiful, and we don't really know how good a book is until we read it. Do we really want to devote our entire lives to reading relatively few books over and over again?

And do we even always want to read high-quality books?

I have rarely reread a murder mystery or a thriller. In fact, I can't think of any. And yet, like most readers, I enjoy a good mystery or a good thriller now and then. Must we deprive ourselves of books that entertain more than they enlighten? Can't a book be worth reading just once?