Coming Back For More of the Same

[kerravonsen]

I've been thinking, the past few days, what it is that makes a book worth reading twice. There are three types of books in the world: those worth reading twice, those worth reading once, and those not worth reading at all.

While most discussions about books tend to be trying to divide between those worth reading and those not worth reading, I'm wondering today what it is that distinguishes those worth reading once between those worth reading over and over.

A book that's worth reading once can have good ideas and good plot, but good ideas can only be novel once, and a good plot, while that can still be part of the appeal, it isn't sufficient to be coming back for, because once you've read it once, you already know what happened. What I'm wondering today is, what is it about a book that makes it worth reading again even though you already know what's happened in it, even though you already know what nifty ideas it has.

Here's a few: style, snappy dialogue, a love of words, scenes you want to savour. For example, I absolutely adore the proposal scene in Lois McMaster Bujold's "A Civil Campaign", and also the Nikki-refuses-to-come scene just before that. It's just so delicious I want to read it again and again. But what makes a scene delicious may vary from person to person.

Ideas?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_finn_/]

19: Metamagical Themas; some chapters only once, others 4 or 5 times. Never liked Godel, Escher, Bach, so was surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

Hrm, what's Metamagical Themas like? I've read (scatteredly mind you) through GEB, and found it often strangely compelling at times, yet a huge struggle to hack through. The story, while interesting at first, got quite irritating, yet the concepts it portrayed were interesting enough to keep interest. It has the qualities of a 'interesting' reference textbook, where everything builds on information previously interred in the pages, (ie reading it backwards is difficult) but explains concepts that are interesting enough to try and work through, in an entertaining manner...

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

Metamagical Themas is (mostly) a collection of fairly long essays that Hofstadter originally wrote for Scientific American, and I think because of that lacks many of the characteristics I found annoying about Godel, Escher, Bach: less of the saying-the-same-thing-several-different-ways, less look-at-me-I'm-endearing stuff like the Achilles/tortoise dialogues in GEB. He deals with a lot of different subjects, so there'll probably be some sections that don't appeal (I skipped a chapter or two on Rubik's cubes, for example), but there's also almost bound to be a lot that does, and although they're all tied together to some extent (there's additional material written specifically for the book on most of the subjects covered), you don't have to read the boring sections to understand the rest. Definitely worth a look.

[kerravonsen]

Sounds interesting! I admit I only got about a third of the way through GEB, even with more than one attempt. I liked the Achilles/tortoise dialogues, though.