| The book I've read the most times is Three Little Pigs or "the wolf book" as my son used to request it just about every night for an extended period of time. Children's books dominate my most read list. And they are very important books because what's important about reading a book is mostly the experience of reading and less about the content. The content of a book isn't static. The content is a collaboration between the words on the page and the churning and whirring in the reader's head which isn't just churning and whirring because of the book and so varies from moment to moment and varies a lot from decade to decade. Which is why children want to hear the same story every night and why young readers often read Harry Potter several times rather than always seeking novelty in new books. Which was how I was as an early reader of science fiction. Then for several decades I sought the novelty of new books mostly. Largely because that's how I thought of myself as an adult reader...and then one day I read The Hobbit for the umpteenth time, but the first time since I was a child and out loud because my child was a child. It reads aloud very well and that inspired me to start rereading LoTR (for the O(n * umpteen)th time and it's the literary equivalent of a 200 slide slide deck...but I digress. The big thing is rereading is not reading the same book because of how much I've changed. I'm a much more experienced reader. Even excluding children's books I've probably read close to a hundred books through more than once. I read Blood Meridian cover to cover and then immediately reread the whole thing on two separate occasions about twenty years apart. All four times it was different. To me that's a good proxy for importance. |