How do you characterise your favourite books? The emotional impact of the book and your enjoyment while reading it are no doubt important. So is your desire to share the book; as John Green put it in The Fault in Our Stars:

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

But to my mind, what cements a book as a favourite is your overriding need to read it all over again – whether tomorrow, next month, or next year. There’s something to be said for Oscar Wilde’s assertion: ‘If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.’

Why do we re-read books? In part, I think we long to connect to the initial wonder – all the ‘feels’ of the first reading. But I don’t believe we are seeking the same experience again. We know that each reading is a little different, and we want to encounter that difference.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov declared that ‘one cannot read a book: one can only re-read it’. In his collected Lectures on Literature he wrote:

A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

In a recent article for the New York Times Review of Books, Tim Parks expanded on the idea:

What is different on a second and subsequent readings is our growing capacity for retention, for putting things in relation to one another. We know the end of the story now and can see how it is foreshadowed at the beginning, how the strands are spun and gathered together… [W]e feel we know the novel better, or at least are more aware of its careful construction. It is gratifying.

So each time you read a book, you find a new level of gratification. Certainly, this is my experience of the books on my ‘favourites’ shelf, many of which are complicated, multi-layered classic works of literature.

In a sense, the new offering from EL James, Grey, which is dominating the bestseller lists is tapping into the desire to re-read. Those who loved the Fifty Shades series are keen to re-read the story from a fresh perspective to build on their reading experience. But I wonder how many readers will re-read the book? For how many will Grey go on the favourites shelf?

In our modern times, everything moves quickly. We get, we consume, we discard – we get, we consume, we discard. For many, reading is fast-paced escapism: we download a ‘quick read’, devour it in one or two sittings, and then download the next read. We don’t re-read; we move ever forwards, seeking new thrills. Which is understandable. But sometimes we can forget the pleasure to be had from slowing down and revisiting the old.

I will leave you with advice from 19th-century English pastor Charles H. Spurgeon:

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and re-read them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many’.