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

[several-bees.livejournal.com]

(Wandering by via communicator)

There are very few books that I'll read once that I won't willingly read again at some point. This includes dictionaries and reference books and collections of essays. It's partly because I'm a fairly fussy reader first time round - I probably finish fewer than half the books I start, if I've got something else to replace them with when I give up - but also partly because the characteristics that appeal to me on a first reading are characteristics that remain appealing after that: likeable tone or characters; jokes; ideas and facts that are initially slightly outside my area of competence; a writing style I enjoy.

Tom Stoppard generally scores particularly high for rereadability, combining most of the above with a density sufficient that I notice something new at least the first couple of times I reread. Other reread books, and the age I was when I first read them, and approximations of the number of times I reread them, because I'm trying to avoid being productive:

5: The Book of Brownies, Enid Blyton. Reread maybe 5 times. There was a section where the brownies were trapped in the Land of the Very Clever People, and had to talk in rhyme all the time; that particular section I reread about twice as often.

8: The Prisoner of Zenda. Reread probably 9 or 10 times. Liked the characters, liked the whole swashbuckling-adventure thing, cried at the end the first several times.

11: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, subsequently reread far more often than I'm willing to admit, particularly over the next few years.

13: A dictionary of classical allusions. Reread 6 or 7 times. I'm not sure why; the scraps of compelling stories, I suppose, and the way I remembered more each time, so all the stories became more tightly meshed together.

14: The Walled Orchard. Finished it at three one morning, started rereading it when I woke up four hours later, then another several times within the next year. The decline of democratic Athens, told from the point of view of a desperately likeable and embittered rival of Aristophanes.

15: Wodehouse's Psmith books. several times each, because Psmith was so very very lovely.

16: Swordspoint, maybe half a dozen times, because I'd open it to look at first page's lovely wintry town, and then realise that oh, I'd just read it again.

17: Assorted Saki short stories, 3 or 4 times (I'd just gained access to the university library, so had more books, and thus reread the ones I liked less often).

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.

Haven't reread much over the last few years, mostly because the time available for doing so has declined somewhat, but it's still quite rare that I'll find a book worth finishing and not have reread it within a year or eighteen months.

[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.