14 ms·

Why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

240 points by benbreen 12y ago

lisa_henderson 12y ago
I have read Hemmingway's novel The Sun Also Rises 5 times. It's a book that has a lot of dialogue. It is funny to notice that it's the dialogue that changes the most for me, when I read something again, a few years later. Maybe on one reading I am in a humorous mood, so I read all the dialogue in a way that maximizes the joking. Another time, I'm in a romantic mood, so I read all the dialogue in a way that maximizes that aspect of it.
- hodwik 12y ago
  That's only true for lesser authors, of which I am including Hemingway. edit: Lesser does not mean valueless. It means not at the same level. To be lesser than a master doesn't make one worthless, it just means one is not at the highest possible caliber in their art form. Mark Twain, on the other hand, is dialogue-heavy and yet you get a very stronge sense of what emotion you're intended to read sections in because he gave the characters much more flesh and blood. To compare -- Hemingway - “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.” Twain - "'Ransomed? What's that?' 'I don't know. But that's what they do. I've seen it in books; and so of course that's what we've got to do.' 'But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?' 'Why blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books, and get things all muddled up?'"
  - shawn-furyan 12y ago
    I haven't actually read Hemingway, but I assume the people that love him do so for some reason. With that in mind, my interpretation of this comparison is akin to a comparison between Rush and My Bloody Valentine, or Led Zeppelin to Brian Eno, or Bach to Phillip Glass. The left sides of those comparisons are much more explicit. The right sides are implicit, mushier, and more subjective; they aren't necessarily intended to create a uniform response among their listeners. This isn't generally considered a failing, and in fact all of these artists are highly respected in different, but overlapping circles.
  - SwellJoe 12y ago
    It is odd that you would choose Twain as the contrast to Hemingway. They are, to me, so very similar as to be categorized as the same kind of literature in my head. I enjoy them both, and feel they are excellent purveyors of the craft of the American novel. There was a great anecdote in one of Asimov's autobiographies about Hemingway, which has stuck with me for years. I am on a tablet at the moment so I won't try to find it, but the gist of it was he went to see an editor when he was quite young and maybe unpublished. The editor asked him, "How do you think Hemingway would say it was raining outside?" And Asimov replied he didn't know. The editor answered, "It was raining outside". I am pretty sure that koan-like piece of advice shaped Asimov in pretty good ways...and also summarizes Hemingway surprisingly effectively.
justinpaulson 12y ago
I've read Go, Dog, Go about 100 times to my daughter and she still yells for it almost every night, we have hundreds of books, come on!
- famblycat 12y ago
  I remember going through that stage with my kids. To keep myself stimulated I'd add an extra bit here, a funny voice there, kept what worked and kept building and building on top of the actual text in the books. It was like a performance after a while, and of course, my poor wife would never do it "right" when she read it.
  - gregpilling 12y ago
    my wife does "Skippy Jon Jones" like a one-woman broadway show. The kids won't even bother asking me to read anything now. If mom is not available, they just go straight to bed . Dad's performance is lacking.
    - vitamen 12y ago
      That book kind of begs for the performance.
  - jerf 12y ago
    When I'm not sure if the kids are tuned in or not, I randomly substitute a noun with "gorilla". Turns out they're pretty much always tuned in. But I still like to check sometimes. They've moved from noticing it, to being annoyed by it, to now making a theatrical production out of how annoyed they are by it (but are clearly enjoying it). As a bonus, it keeps me on my toes for the time most entertaining to me to substitute: I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Gorilla-I-Am The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Gorilla Goodnight comb and goodnight brush Goodnight nobody, Goodnight brush, And goodnight to the gorilla whispering "hush"...
    - gknoy 12y ago
krelian 12y ago
With books (and also films and video games), I feel that I read new ones so that I may find the few that I would like to read again at some point. The idea of being intimately familiar with , well, any subject, is very attractive to me. The idea that I know it inside and out, that I have complete control of it, is very satisfying. Unfortunately becoming a master of anything takes a very long time so while I do fantasize on one day having the free time to really become one with my favorites "things" the fact that I have less free time as years go buy (and being a very slow reader) ultimately means that it will be an unfulfilled aspiration.
jkot 12y ago
I read some books 100 times, but mostly technical manuals. It is good to have some basic stuff in long term memory of our brain Author is writer and should put disclaimer "...because it is good for my job and I like it". Hamlet does not apply anywhere. > It’s not just that Hamlet is a great piece of literature, either. It’s that every scene is a great piece of literature. I read Hamlet and it felt like spoof of itself. It does not have a story, every character dies, too many boiler plate dialogs. Perhaps it was great in 17th century, but there are better things today.
- Retra 12y ago
  Hamlet doesn't have a story? I don't believe you've even read it.
gregpilling 12y ago
I call it 'comfort reading' like comfort food. It is one of the books I pick up when I am lying in bed sick for the day. Usually something by Heinlein/Clarke or maybe Asimov. Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Tunnel in the sky, Friday, Rama, have all been read 5 to 10 times.
- teh_klev 12y ago
  I go back and re-read the Foundation books (usually just the first three) every three or so years, have done since 1985. They're an excellent example comfort reading for me and I never get bored with them. I even bought two new sets just for this purpose because I love the covers of the early 1980's copies I have that were published in the UK, and just so as not to wear them out. I know it's not "high-literature" by any stretch of the imagination, but they scratch an itch.
- brandonmenc 12y ago
  Exactly. I read the entire original Dune series a couple of few times a year, always in bed at night - I imagine, much like people read their Bibles. Having done it so many times, it's become "low impact" reading - appropriate for situations where reading something new is "too much."
  - burkaman 12y ago
    All 6 books, a few times a year? I'm reading through the series for the first time, and while I'm sure a reread goes faster, it still must take quite a few nights. It is really good though, I'm sure I'll want to do it again once I'm finished.
    - brandonmenc 12y ago
      If you read 20 pages a night, you can cover the whole series twice in 250-ish days. Once you've read it a few times, you can get through 20 pages in like 15 minutes.
- matwood 12y ago
  I remember reading Rama the first time as a kid. How that hasn't been turned into a movie yet is beyond me.
andy_wrote 12y ago
Worth noting that Hopkins rereads his scripts because he is acting on them, in both the specific and general sense of "act," and not necessarily for the casual reader's pleasure. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a professional musician plays a piece > 100x before he performs it on stage, or that a translator ends up reading the source material > 100x before she translates it. I do agree that rereading a book you enjoyed is valuable, but if you're not a professional "actor" on the artwork, or you didn't passionately love the book, I think it's preferable to wait between rereads, longer than would make possible 100 rereads in a human lifetime. You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader.
- bornabox 12y ago
  Doing it for professional reasons aside, I do get why reading something (good/deep) for 100x might be very interesting. If you repeat the same word lot's of times, it starts to loose meaning to you after saying it 20x or 30 times. Then you keep going and it comes back. But it's different. Maybe like... "a Rose is a Rose is a Rose...". In literature, repeating things definitely gives it a different meaning. And then there are books/texts that are very dense. Like Wittgenstein's Tractatus.. that one you'll read a 100x if you want to understand it.
- visakanv 12y ago
  I love books a lot, and I like to think that I like them "deeper" than most people– I reread almost everything I like at least 2-3 times. But yeah, 100 re-reads is something you only do if you're goddamn hell bent on deconstructing it. (I haven't yet found a book I feel that strongly about.) Otherwise you're probably better off reading more books and getting more context.
  - sanderjd 12y ago
    I just realized that now that it's been a few minutes since I read the article, my take-away was actually "there is a lot of value in re-reading books", rather than "you should read some books literally 100 times". I'm not sure which was supposed to be the take-away, but I think the former makes more sense than the latter! So yeah, re-reading books you like 2-3 times is a great and enjoyable exercise.
hodwik 12y ago
I wish I understood the desire to re-read books or re-watch movies. It makes no sense to me at all.
- gadders 12y ago
  Not sure about films, but I think if the book is sufficiently deep it bares re-reading. For instance, I first read the Thomas Covenant books when I was maybe 15. I'm pretty sure a good 50% of the subtlety went over my head at that age. I'd hope at 43 I'd understand more of it now. Any maybe even more when I'm 60.
- graeme 12y ago
  Have you tried? I just reread the brothers karamazov at 29. I first read it when I was 22. There a lot of it that I understand better, or differently, because I'm older. The idea is to reread good things. Those usually have depth. Actually, PG wrote about this: http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html
  - hodwik 12y ago
    I have, and I always find that by the time I come back to a book a second time around it always feels used up or depleted in some way. It's like trying to re-read an old math textbook after having gone through multiple higher level math texts afterwards. There may be a couple bits and pieces I was missing, but I had the gist, and so re-reading was a waste of time. For example, one of the books I most enjoyed reading was Mahfouz's Madiq Alley. It built in me some of the cultural sensitivities of the early 20th century Egyptians. I cherish those sensitivities, but in my readings I have gone on and read other books that have further extended those sensitivities. Now, when I try to go back and re-read Madiq Alley I find it less than enriching.
    - graeme 12y ago
      Have you tried rereading any book that people consider an eternal classic? A math textbook typically wouldn't fit the bill (though certain exceptional textbooks would of course) and Madiq Alley gets good reviews, but opinion seems mixed. Hamlet, by contrast, is still widely read centuries after publishing. I expect Wodehouse will continue to be read long after we're dead (plus the author of the original piece had a personal connection). There's no guarantee you'll like rereading of course. But I've found I can't reread most books, but others I can read many, many times.
quarterwave 12y ago
While the Jeeves stories are good, they can't hold a candle to the time when lawlessness raised its head at Blandings Castle, or to the effect of Mulliner's Buck-u-Uppo tonic on the Bishop and the Vicar (quoting from memory, e.&o.e): "Tell him we're a couple of cats" "We're a couple of cats" "Oh, that's all right then" said Mulliner as he stood aside to let them in. The Bishop, being an artist at heart, mewed as he climbed in, to lend verisimilitude to the deception. A perfect storm of wonderful English prose with a boundless absurdity of form and circumstance.
weavie 12y ago
So, what books do people here think are worth reading 100 times?
- bmelton 12y ago
  I've read "The Princess Bride" about as many times as I've seen the movie, which, while I haven't kept a close count, is a lot. I don't know that it's something I'd recommend to everyone, but the book has its own sort of whimsy that is distinct from the movie, though both are enjoyable. Kerouac's "On the Road" is another that I read often. Somewhere in the once-a-year phase. "Slaughterhouse Five" is another I read with some regularity, and I find it different every time I read it, as I have a new set of personal beliefs with which to apply to it approximately every time.
  - Tenhundfeld 12y ago
    WRT "The Princess Bride", I've read it a few times as well. My perspective is slightly different, reading it after watching the movie many times. I agree that it "has its own sort of whimsy", especially in the context or meta-story, but when I first read it, I was struck by how similar the humor is to the movie. If memory serves me, almost all of the memorable lines and jokes from the movie come word-for-word from the book. I'd assumed some of the jokes, e.g., those by Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) or Fezzik (Andre the Giant), were adapted to suit the actors. But they weren't. I don't know if that speaks to the quality of the writing or the casting or what.
  - ashark 12y ago
    PRINCESS BRIDE (THE BOOK) SPOILERS The great thing about it, IMO, is that the novel's not about the story from the movie, really, but nevertheless you can do to it what the protagonist is doing to the fictional Princess Bride book and tell it to your kids as if it were the movie, by skipping the "boring parts", i.e. the important parts if you're reading it as an adult. It's a great and funny adventure story for kids, wrapped in a melancholy meditation on relationships with children and recapturing lost time and experiences for adults[1], which is (rightly) absent from the movie. The story itself tells you how to adapt it for reading to kids. It's its own instruction manual. I absolutely love the notion of a kid picking up the book as an adult, expecting the story their parents read to them, and being surprised by the discovery of the real story, hidden from them in exactly the same way the bits about economics and such were from the protagonist. It's simply brilliant, and a scenario I fully intend to set up for my kids :-) [1] This is from memory—I read it several years ago, and if I revisit it I'm sure my take would have more nuance now, and would find this to be an embarrassing misreading or oversimplification.
JSeymourATL 12y ago
Recalling Paul Graham's recent blog post on the benefits of re-reading: reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase "already read" seems almost ill-formed. http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html
SCHiM 12y ago
One line in the article piqued my interest, as it echoes something I read somewhere else. Seeing as it comes from someone who is an absolute expert on the subject makes it even more interesting. > "In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved..." It has been noted that this type of recursion/layering is something that we can't help but be intrigued by. This subject is explored in great detail, and unparalleled depth, in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] by Douglas Hofstadter. He notes that this doesn't only happen in stories and is a common theme in music as well and may even be the root of what we call 'intelligence'. I think he's definitively on the right track, and I thoroughly recommend his book to anyone that has even a passing interest in mathematics, logic, philosophy, programming, music or psychology. Of all the books I have read GEB has had the most profound impact on my life in terms of how much it made me think and evaluate the world around me and the ideas inside the book. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
- rspeer 12y ago
  I've found that GEB is a great book to read and re-read. Not only will the math be more accessible the second time around, but the text also conceals numerous "easter eggs" that you might only find on subsequent readings, or might never find. I've done in-person GEB reading groups where I learned lots of things from my co-readers. I've tried to replicate that experience online at http://www.reddit.com/r/geb http://www.reddit.com/r/geb, and there have been cases where other people have pointed out interesting things, but it's hard to get discussion going beyond the beginning of the book. Unfortunately, it seems right now that people who want to follow-up on GEB ideas go to YouTube, where the conversation is disconnected enough that facile and wrong conclusions thrive. (No, a crab canon is not a Mobius strip. Some dude on YouTube made that up. It's not real.)
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  i've read Gödel, Escher, Bach cover-to-cover three times. the first time, in high school, it opened my eyes to a bunch of cool ideas, and jump-started my interested in computer science. i didn't 'get it' at all. i knew there was a bunch of neat topics, but the idea that there was any overall theme was lost. the second time, in college, i started to understand the musical content a bit more, and started understanding that there was a 'bigger picture' the author was trying to paint. i still wasn't sure what that was. the third time, after college, I think i finally understood what the author was getting at - his model for consciousness. this was also the second time i'd read the introduction. that book has done a lot to help me understand the world, and particularly the structure of my own thoughts. i don't know if consciousness _always_ works the way he suggests it does, but i've found a lot of utility in viewing myself as a recursive tangled loop, where physical symbols reflecting the external world started reflecting their reflection of it.
searine 12y ago
One of the few books I've ever re-read more than once was Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I've read it four or five times now. There is always something new to find in it.
- CocaKoala 12y ago
  A lot of Neal Stephenson's work holds up to rereadings. I've gone through the Baroque Cycle + Cryptonomicon maybe three times now, and I guess I'm due for a fourth soon.
  - rkroondotnet 12y ago
    The Baroque Cycle is an undertaking, since my first read of it I have moved on to the audio books, subway listening being easier than subway reading. Cryptonomicon I am at about 15 reads (including audio book listens a few more), and maybe a handful for Snow Crash, Anathem and Reamde. My book of choice for re-reading is Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, by Jeffrey Archer. I must be at 50 re-reads of that now, and I own two first editions. Strange what catches your mind!
  - vitamen 12y ago
    I read Snow Crash once a year (usually I listen to the audiobook these days) but I'm thinking of switching up to the Baroque Cycle. I'm glad there's finally an unabridged Cryptonomicon audiobook - for a long time there was not.
segmondy 12y ago
I've read Hackers by Steven Levy at least 30 times. I should schedule a reading soon. The book is as exciting each time I reread it, strangest thing!
cllns 12y ago
The author of this piece, Stephen Marche, has a great essay that appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books site last summer, called "The Literature of the Second Gilded Age" [1]: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-second-gilded-age https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-second-gilded-a...
geebee 12y ago
What a good article. Interestingly, I read this just after reading Bob Dylan's pretty fascinating speech (delivered ac couple of days ago at musicales. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-grammys-2015-transcript-of-bob-dylans-musicares-person-of-year-speech-20150207-story.html#page=1 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-gr... Bob Dylan stresses the importance of how many times he listened to a song and how much of an influence it had on what he wrote: "For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once. If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand." If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too. " Dylan says this repeatedly about many of his songs (I really do recommend reading his speech). I do think there's some merit to this (though of course I don't think it's quite that simple). It's also interesting to keep something in mind. It's easy to do some things 100 times, it's harder to do other things 100 times. I've listened to plenty of songs 100 times - I think the interesting thing about Dylan was that he was listening to these songs with an unusual engagement, and that they were (at the time) somewhat unusual songs to be listening to 100 times. I'd say it's hard to read Joyce's Ulysses 100 times, but Ulysses isn't an undiscovered work. Probably the real key is to listen to or read something 100 times that people don't realize understand the value of quite yet and that takes considerable time and effort to understand. That takes some passion, and a willingness to be considered a bit odd.
drostie 12y ago
I've read the ten Amber books by Roger Zelazny all the way through ten times, which sorta-counts. A total read-through of those books can be done in a 3-day weekend if you read the whole day, so if you want a rough idea of the time commitment of a centireading, it's about a month of day-long readings. Another way to view it is a task of reading two books a week for a year. Like the Zelazny books, you need to have something which has the right "flow" for you to really make it work. My English professor at Cornell was fond of saying, "There is no good writing, only good rewriting. There is no good reading, only good rereading." He calls to mind how it's easier and more powerful to condense and re-articulate your article/book when you know where it starts, where it ends, and how it gets from A to B: then he comments, so too you get a greater appreciation of the details of what you're reading when you can see the overall story. In the case of the Roger Zelazny books, there was one section in particular where this happened. We see a flashback from Merlin's perspective to a time when he is a teenager and he takes his all-to-human girlfriend on an insane journey through impossible landscapes which putatively exist just-next-door. In the discussion that follows, it seems like, by not telling her his secret, he's shutting her out: What could I say? It was not only that telling her of Shadow would disturb, perhaps destroy, her view of reality. At the heart of my problem lay the realization that it would also require telling her how I knew this, which would mean telling her who I am, where I am from, what I am--and I was afraid to give her this knowledge. I told myself that it would end our relationship as surely as telling her nothing would; and if it must end either way, I would rather we parted without her possessing this knowledge. Later, much later, I was to see this for the rationalization it was; my real reason for denying her the answers she desired was that I was not ready to trust her, or anyone, so close to me as I really am. Had I known her longer, better--another year, say--I might have answered her. I don't know. We never used the word "love," though it must have run through her mind on occasion, as it did through mine. It was, I suppose, that I didn't love her enough to trust her, and then it was too late. So, "I can't tell you," were my words. "You have some power that you will not share." "Call it that, then." "I would do whatever you say, promise whatever you want promised." "There is a reason, Julia." She is on her feet, arms akimbo. "And you won't even share that." I shake my head. "It must be a lonely world you inhabit, magician, if even those who love you are barred from it." At that moment it seems she is simply trying her last trick for getting an answer from me. I screw my resolve yet tighter. "I didn't say that." "You didn't have to. It is your silence that tells me. If you know the road to Hell too, why not head that way? Good-bye!" "Julia. Don't..." She chooses not to hear me. Still life with flowers... If you're just reading through this, it seems perhaps like she's gone power-hungry; you sympathize with Merlin. But read through it again. Pay particular attention to that sentence in the first paragraph: we never used the word "love", and then just consider the exchange, "It must be a lonely world you inhabit, magician, if even those who love you are barred from it." / "I didn't say that." On rereading, you realize that from her perspective, she's jumping out into vulnerable territory, using this word which they've never used before, and when he shuts her down, from her perspective he's basically saying "I didn't say that I loved you."
abruzzi 12y ago
I don't count my rereading, but for good books, once is never enough. When I got the the end of "Satanic Verses" for the first time, I was so taken, I started it again the very next day. Similar with "Against the Day". If I had to guess, the most rereads I've done is ~20-30 rereads of "Cats Cradle". Part of the reason for that is it is such an easy read, and I can usually finish it in a day or two. Its also a great novel. I'd like to say I've read "Gravity's Rainbow" that many times, but for its density, having read it four or five times is a feat unto itself.
doki_pen 12y ago
I keep reading The Idiot and Walden. The nice thing is that after you read a book a few times, you can just open to any page and start reading. Walden is especially good for random selection.
deleted 12y ago
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ommunist 12y ago
Upvoting this. Because the book always stays the same. Its the reader who changes.
personlurking 12y ago
I've never read a book more than once, not even a comic book when I was a kid. I have, though, seen cerebral films (pretty much my favorite kind) as many as 5-15 times each. What I haven't seen anyone mention here in the comments, is reading several books on the same subject, but from different perspectives. IE, 2-3 history books, by different authors, on the same country and era. This is something I have done and do get a bit of enjoyment out of.
- jkaunisv1 12y ago
  I really enjoyed taking that approach to the Vietnam war. It was edifying to read a general who was there describe the exact same events as a journalist writing post-9/11, yet only the location and time matched up. It made their biases stand out so starkly.
normloman 12y ago
I'm gonna read 50 Shades of Gray 100 times. Then I'll truly understand the profound message that EL James was trying to say.
legacy2013 12y ago
I was involved with theater when I was younger, and would always read the script 50-60 times outside of rehersal. Halfway through a 4 month production, I would not only know my lines, but they would come to me naturally, leading me to interact as if I was that character. The book I've probably read the most is One of the Eragon books.... last count I was at 24 read through. I really love that book. You do notice something different every time
Animats 12y ago
This is the process used by some religions to induce obsessive religious behavior in their members.
- assholesRppl2 12y ago
  And the same process used by the Sun to keep us waking up every day! Damn you, Sun, you religious zealot! Sorry, I've had too much coffee, and I'm an asshole. But my point still stands: just because some process may analogously resemble something else, it doesn't mean it's the same process. The end goals are different.
shalmanese 12y ago
Other similar experiments include Cinema 52, where a group of people agreed to watch the same movie, once a week for a year. Top Gun the first year, Back to the Future the second year and Avatar the third year: http://www.cinema52.com/the-experiment/ http://www.cinema52.com/the-experiment/ Also The Lawrence Julie & Julia project where one guy decided to watch the movie Julie and Julia every single day for an entire year: http://www.lawrenceandjulieandjulia.com/ http://www.lawrenceandjulieandjulia.com/
- towelguy 12y ago
  Reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/
- bakul 12y ago
  To truly appreciate rewatching they should've watched The Groundhog Day every week for a year. Followed by 50 First Dates!
  - shortimer 12y ago
    I've watched Groundhog Day probably 100 times. For six or so months, I left it on repeat on the main house TV (I lived alone at the time).
nsomaru 12y ago
Re-reading is good, but shouldn't we remember that time is also limited? What I'm saying is: all books are not equal. Hamlet == Jeeves? Also, there are different kinds of reading. Sometimes I'm just "consuming content," and others I'm actually reading. In the former case, I get a dull sort of continuous pleasure. In the latter, it's more like I'm engaging on a journey with the author, which happens in fiction a lot, but the best kicks come from philosophy. A single paragraph from Schopenhauer[] may contain such high signal (to me), the it requires careful scrutiny and thought. This kind of reading is engaging with the text, but I'm not sure that it would be worth it in the case of Jeeves. Why go looking for water in the (relative) desert when you can visit the ocean? [] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915729 for Schopenhauer's essay /On Thinking for Yourself/. It's a great read for anyone who wants some well presented thoughts about reading itself and its relation to thinking. Highly recommended!
- bathMarm0t 12y ago
  That essay seems far too hardlined. "Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one’s own." -S Really? I'm going to agree that your "consuming content" fits this bill (in all mediums mind you. Mindlessly doing anything fits this bill), but I've taken to reading used books with red pen, and scarring the pages with excerpts, thoughts, counterpoints, interpretations, etc. I view that as an absolutely critical part of reading now. "and it may sometimes happen that he could have found it [some great truth] all ready to hand in a book and spared himself the trouble." -S You don't FIND these truths in books. The books bring out and expose the truths that lie in your experience. Take, for example, reading the classics in high school (Heart of Darkness, Gatsby, Crime and Punishment, etc). Those books meant notheng to me. My experiential quorum was unmet. I couldn't even vote on whether these topics were relevant (let alone true). It was only after I experienced, felt, lived. Only after being could the books show themselves. The authors feel the same way you feel, they just put it better. More succinctly. We all have the ingredients, they just know how to simmer things. Compare Schopenhauer with Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon) "People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from." -H
smoyer 12y ago
As in "Fahrenheit 451", if you're going to read something 100 times, take pains to memorize it along the way (it's not as hard as it sounds with practice).
RockofStrength 12y ago
Reading deeply vs. reading widely- an interesting debate question.
nether 12y ago
Why reading 100 books is much better.
WalterBright 12y ago
Reminds me of the academic who knew everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet, had thoroughly analyzed it, its roots, context, etc. And who'd throw it all away for the joy of reading it for the first time.
rossta 12y ago
I'll let you all know what I think after I've read the article 100 times.
GoofballJones 12y ago
I'm sorry, I can't subscribe to this idea. I have a finite time in my life, and there are way too many books for me to read. There are so many books I want to read that it's literally going to take me a lifetime as it is...so every book I re-read is a new book I'll never get to read.
gitpusher 12y ago
He never really substantiates the article's title. Why exactly is it a great idea? That is, why read a single text 100 times rather than reading a greater variety? Its benefits seem limited to niche situations (such as an actor re-reading a script, or a lawyer re-reading some legislation, or an academic re-reading Hamlet). I do feel that certain books deserve (nay, DEMAND) a re-reading, in order to fully appreciate their content. But 5-10 times is entirely sufficient for the layperson, unless you're writing a dissertation on the topic. I'd much prefer to read MORE books, than a single book again and again!
- scott_s 12y ago
  Because it's comforting.
zer0defex 12y ago
I do this with audiobooks all the time. It's easier to passsively listen to books I've already read since you can miss parts and still know what's going on. I never really intended to "learn" the books, but I've definitely noticed improvements in how much info seems to be available in my active memory. Really quite useful as it lets you connect related concepts in meetings and chatting much faster. Seth Goden just wrote a blog post about it actually: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/can-sound-waves-change-your-life.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/can-sound-wa...
louprado 12y ago
For those who primarily read engineering and technical texts, do you find you have an unusually low reading speed when switching to ordinary literature ? I expected reading-speed to be 1:1 inversely proportional idea-density, but that never happens. Any suggestions for a techie who wants to read faster ?
- jessermeyer 12y ago
  http://www.spritzlet.com/ http://www.spritzlet.com/
pitt1980 12y ago
wrong thread, sorry
ygmelnikova 12y ago
tl;dr
- ygmelnikova 12y ago
  So much negativity on this comment. It's a statement. This is the generation of tl;dr. SAT scores are down, IQs are down since the Victorian age by 10 points. What percentage of the population would read the entirety of that article, let alone a single book 100 times? That comment is both sarcastic and ironic. Perfect.
wazoox 12y ago
Books I've read many, many times and plan to reread again: Umberto Eco's Foucault's pendulum. Homer's Odyssey. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. These never gets old :)
- benten10 12y ago
  ...Focault's pendulum... did you 'attempt' to read it six different times, or do six complete scans of it? I ask because every time I pick the book up again, I seem to read only half of what needs to be read. Ideally, a binary algorithm like that would finish in logarithmic of the book's pages times, but it seems to get longer every time. Amazing book though. I just...can't seem to finish it. Eco and Rushdie are my two biggest heroes. Now Rushdie's books, them I've read thrice for almost all of them. Except the much-hated Satanic Verses, which I've read twice that many times. It gets better every time its read.
  - wazoox 12y ago
    Foucault's pendulum: I love that book. The adventures of Casaubon and al entertain me to no end. I've read it many, many times cover to cover, I've typed in (in 1987) and run the BASIC program generating God's name, I've read encyclopedias for details on the countless trivia in the book. really it's my favorite Eco. It's so clever you feel smart just reading it, it's so choke full with interesting stuff, so funny and ironic and meta-referential...
superuser2 12y ago
I'm a stage manager. It's certainly true that the relationship theater practitioners form with a script is much deeper and more rewarding than the experience a casual reader forms with a novel, and a large part of that is familiarity. I'll read a play 5-6 times in preproduction alone, between an initial read for pleasure, close reading for technical requirements, an inevitably slow read to type an electronic copy, several proofreads of my electronic copy, proofreading of the director's cut, etc. There's a table readthrough first thing after the play is cast, and then (if there's a long gap of time) another one at the first rehearsal. And then there's rehearsal. The director and actors figure out at each moment 1) what does each character want, 2) what prior action in the play made them want it, 3) what is the obstacle preventing them from getting it, 4) how does saying a line contribute to overcoming that obstacle, etc. You don't necessarily talk about this for every single line, but anywhere it's not obvious, it will be discussed. (Different directors have different styles, but everything I've seen is a variation on this.) They also do a fair amount of "table work" and homework assignments where actors invent their characters' backstories, prior relationships, etc. I sit through all of this, and it's my job to be reading so that I can prompt and correct lines, as well as (silently) figure out that a designer should know about something, and add it to my report. We usually visit each moment 3-4 times in this phase. So that's 3-4 very close reads. Then we start running larger chunks - groups of scenes, then acts, then the entire show. All told, probably about 7-8 passes through the show. I'm still on book, and I'm getting a sense of how the pieces fit together. We periodically go back to detail work on parts that the director is unsatisfied with. And then tech. 2-3 full tech runs where I am completely engaged and in the moment, calling cues. And then 7-8 performances, but that's cause it's educational theater. In a professional setting, there could be a hundred. At the end of it, I know Streetcar. I have most of it memorized, I know what everything means and why it's said, I know who everyone is and what their intentions are, I know how the plot fits together, I know how the words are supposed to sound, I know the pulse. At the end of my run, I had probably read it 50 times. People outside of theater/film don't really read anything 50 times. I have a lot deeper and more rewarding relationship with Streetcar than you do with Crime and Punishment, and >50 passes through the script probably helped. But spending dozens-hundreds of hours listening to professionals pick apart the text and develop meaning from it probably contributed too.
tsotha 12y ago
All I can think is your time must have very little value if you can read nontrivial books 100 times.
ternaryoperator 12y ago
In the centuries before books became cheap and mass produced, a family would own only a handful of books. These books tended to be passed around and reread repeatedly. The modern period of being read widely was preceded by one of being read deeply.
vedant 12y ago
To anyone who might adopt "centireading" as a neologism, just want to point out that the correct SI prefix for 100x is "hecto." "Centi" is a hundredth of something, not a hundred something. Tons of people are "centi"-readers; they make it through four pages of a four-hundred-page book.
thret 12y ago
Wouldn't it be better to simply memorise a book rather than reread it so many times? I absolutely gain a greater appreciation for poetry after I memorise it, I'm sure it is not so different to the experience he's talking about.
hagan_das 12y ago
Lots of books I want to reread but hard to justify when I already have more books on my "to-read" list than I can read in a lifetime. I do, however, try and re-read Dune once a year. Off-topic but since I've got books on the brain: I recently started reading the Foundation and am kicking myself for not reading it sooner.

240 points by benbreen 12y ago

I have read Hemmingway's novel The Sun Also Rises 5 times. It's a book that has a lot of dialogue. It is funny to notice that it's the dialogue that changes the most for me, when I read something again, a few years later. Maybe on one reading I am in a humorous mood, so I read all the dialogue in a way that maximizes the joking. Another time, I'm in a romantic mood, so I read all the dialogue in a way that maximizes that aspect of it.

hodwik 12y ago
That's only true for lesser authors, of which I am including Hemingway. edit: Lesser does not mean valueless. It means not at the same level. To be lesser than a master doesn't make one worthless, it just means one is not at the highest possible caliber in their art form. Mark Twain, on the other hand, is dialogue-heavy and yet you get a very stronge sense of what emotion you're intended to read sections in because he gave the characters much more flesh and blood. To compare -- Hemingway - “I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what is was all about.” Twain - "'Ransomed? What's that?' 'I don't know. But that's what they do. I've seen it in books; and so of course that's what we've got to do.' 'But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?' 'Why blame it all, we've got to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the books? Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books, and get things all muddled up?'"
- shawn-furyan 12y ago
  I haven't actually read Hemingway, but I assume the people that love him do so for some reason. With that in mind, my interpretation of this comparison is akin to a comparison between Rush and My Bloody Valentine, or Led Zeppelin to Brian Eno, or Bach to Phillip Glass. The left sides of those comparisons are much more explicit. The right sides are implicit, mushier, and more subjective; they aren't necessarily intended to create a uniform response among their listeners. This isn't generally considered a failing, and in fact all of these artists are highly respected in different, but overlapping circles.
- SwellJoe 12y ago
  It is odd that you would choose Twain as the contrast to Hemingway. They are, to me, so very similar as to be categorized as the same kind of literature in my head. I enjoy them both, and feel they are excellent purveyors of the craft of the American novel. There was a great anecdote in one of Asimov's autobiographies about Hemingway, which has stuck with me for years. I am on a tablet at the moment so I won't try to find it, but the gist of it was he went to see an editor when he was quite young and maybe unpublished. The editor asked him, "How do you think Hemingway would say it was raining outside?" And Asimov replied he didn't know. The editor answered, "It was raining outside". I am pretty sure that koan-like piece of advice shaped Asimov in pretty good ways...and also summarizes Hemingway surprisingly effectively.

justinpaulson 12y ago

I've read Go, Dog, Go about 100 times to my daughter and she still yells for it almost every night, we have hundreds of books, come on!

famblycat 12y ago
I remember going through that stage with my kids. To keep myself stimulated I'd add an extra bit here, a funny voice there, kept what worked and kept building and building on top of the actual text in the books. It was like a performance after a while, and of course, my poor wife would never do it "right" when she read it.
- gregpilling 12y ago
  my wife does "Skippy Jon Jones" like a one-woman broadway show. The kids won't even bother asking me to read anything now. If mom is not available, they just go straight to bed . Dad's performance is lacking.
  - vitamen 12y ago
    That book kind of begs for the performance.
- jerf 12y ago
  When I'm not sure if the kids are tuned in or not, I randomly substitute a noun with "gorilla". Turns out they're pretty much always tuned in. But I still like to check sometimes. They've moved from noticing it, to being annoyed by it, to now making a theatrical production out of how annoyed they are by it (but are clearly enjoying it). As a bonus, it keeps me on my toes for the time most entertaining to me to substitute: I do not like green eggs and ham, I do not like them, Gorilla-I-Am The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Gorilla Goodnight comb and goodnight brush Goodnight nobody, Goodnight brush, And goodnight to the gorilla whispering "hush"...
  - gknoy 12y ago

krelian 12y ago

With books (and also films and video games), I feel that I read new ones so that I may find the few that I would like to read again at some point. The idea of being intimately familiar with , well, any subject, is very attractive to me. The idea that I know it inside and out, that I have complete control of it, is very satisfying. Unfortunately becoming a master of anything takes a very long time so while I do fantasize on one day having the free time to really become one with my favorites "things" the fact that I have less free time as years go buy (and being a very slow reader) ultimately means that it will be an unfulfilled aspiration.

jkot 12y ago

I read some books 100 times, but mostly technical manuals. It is good to have some basic stuff in long term memory of our brain Author is writer and should put disclaimer "...because it is good for my job and I like it". Hamlet does not apply anywhere. > It’s not just that Hamlet is a great piece of literature, either. It’s that every scene is a great piece of literature. I read Hamlet and it felt like spoof of itself. It does not have a story, every character dies, too many boiler plate dialogs. Perhaps it was great in 17th century, but there are better things today.

Retra 12y ago
Hamlet doesn't have a story? I don't believe you've even read it.

gregpilling 12y ago

I call it 'comfort reading' like comfort food. It is one of the books I pick up when I am lying in bed sick for the day. Usually something by Heinlein/Clarke or maybe Asimov. Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Tunnel in the sky, Friday, Rama, have all been read 5 to 10 times.

teh_klev 12y ago
I go back and re-read the Foundation books (usually just the first three) every three or so years, have done since 1985. They're an excellent example comfort reading for me and I never get bored with them. I even bought two new sets just for this purpose because I love the covers of the early 1980's copies I have that were published in the UK, and just so as not to wear them out. I know it's not "high-literature" by any stretch of the imagination, but they scratch an itch.
brandonmenc 12y ago
Exactly. I read the entire original Dune series a couple of few times a year, always in bed at night - I imagine, much like people read their Bibles. Having done it so many times, it's become "low impact" reading - appropriate for situations where reading something new is "too much."
- burkaman 12y ago
  All 6 books, a few times a year? I'm reading through the series for the first time, and while I'm sure a reread goes faster, it still must take quite a few nights. It is really good though, I'm sure I'll want to do it again once I'm finished.
  - brandonmenc 12y ago
    If you read 20 pages a night, you can cover the whole series twice in 250-ish days. Once you've read it a few times, you can get through 20 pages in like 15 minutes.
matwood 12y ago
I remember reading Rama the first time as a kid. How that hasn't been turned into a movie yet is beyond me.

andy_wrote 12y ago

Worth noting that Hopkins rereads his scripts because he is acting on them, in both the specific and general sense of "act," and not necessarily for the casual reader's pleasure. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a professional musician plays a piece > 100x before he performs it on stage, or that a translator ends up reading the source material > 100x before she translates it. I do agree that rereading a book you enjoyed is valuable, but if you're not a professional "actor" on the artwork, or you didn't passionately love the book, I think it's preferable to wait between rereads, longer than would make possible 100 rereads in a human lifetime. You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader.

bornabox 12y ago
Doing it for professional reasons aside, I do get why reading something (good/deep) for 100x might be very interesting. If you repeat the same word lot's of times, it starts to loose meaning to you after saying it 20x or 30 times. Then you keep going and it comes back. But it's different. Maybe like... "a Rose is a Rose is a Rose...". In literature, repeating things definitely gives it a different meaning. And then there are books/texts that are very dense. Like Wittgenstein's Tractatus.. that one you'll read a 100x if you want to understand it.
visakanv 12y ago
I love books a lot, and I like to think that I like them "deeper" than most people– I reread almost everything I like at least 2-3 times. But yeah, 100 re-reads is something you only do if you're goddamn hell bent on deconstructing it. (I haven't yet found a book I feel that strongly about.) Otherwise you're probably better off reading more books and getting more context.
- sanderjd 12y ago
  I just realized that now that it's been a few minutes since I read the article, my take-away was actually "there is a lot of value in re-reading books", rather than "you should read some books literally 100 times". I'm not sure which was supposed to be the take-away, but I think the former makes more sense than the latter! So yeah, re-reading books you like 2-3 times is a great and enjoyable exercise.

hodwik 12y ago

I wish I understood the desire to re-read books or re-watch movies. It makes no sense to me at all.

gadders 12y ago
Not sure about films, but I think if the book is sufficiently deep it bares re-reading. For instance, I first read the Thomas Covenant books when I was maybe 15. I'm pretty sure a good 50% of the subtlety went over my head at that age. I'd hope at 43 I'd understand more of it now. Any maybe even more when I'm 60.
graeme 12y ago
Have you tried? I just reread the brothers karamazov at 29. I first read it when I was 22. There a lot of it that I understand better, or differently, because I'm older. The idea is to reread good things. Those usually have depth. Actually, PG wrote about this: http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html
- hodwik 12y ago
  I have, and I always find that by the time I come back to a book a second time around it always feels used up or depleted in some way. It's like trying to re-read an old math textbook after having gone through multiple higher level math texts afterwards. There may be a couple bits and pieces I was missing, but I had the gist, and so re-reading was a waste of time. For example, one of the books I most enjoyed reading was Mahfouz's Madiq Alley. It built in me some of the cultural sensitivities of the early 20th century Egyptians. I cherish those sensitivities, but in my readings I have gone on and read other books that have further extended those sensitivities. Now, when I try to go back and re-read Madiq Alley I find it less than enriching.
  - graeme 12y ago
    Have you tried rereading any book that people consider an eternal classic? A math textbook typically wouldn't fit the bill (though certain exceptional textbooks would of course) and Madiq Alley gets good reviews, but opinion seems mixed. Hamlet, by contrast, is still widely read centuries after publishing. I expect Wodehouse will continue to be read long after we're dead (plus the author of the original piece had a personal connection). There's no guarantee you'll like rereading of course. But I've found I can't reread most books, but others I can read many, many times.

quarterwave 12y ago

While the Jeeves stories are good, they can't hold a candle to the time when lawlessness raised its head at Blandings Castle, or to the effect of Mulliner's Buck-u-Uppo tonic on the Bishop and the Vicar (quoting from memory, e.&o.e): "Tell him we're a couple of cats" "We're a couple of cats" "Oh, that's all right then" said Mulliner as he stood aside to let them in. The Bishop, being an artist at heart, mewed as he climbed in, to lend verisimilitude to the deception. A perfect storm of wonderful English prose with a boundless absurdity of form and circumstance.

weavie 12y ago

So, what books do people here think are worth reading 100 times?

bmelton 12y ago
I've read "The Princess Bride" about as many times as I've seen the movie, which, while I haven't kept a close count, is a lot. I don't know that it's something I'd recommend to everyone, but the book has its own sort of whimsy that is distinct from the movie, though both are enjoyable. Kerouac's "On the Road" is another that I read often. Somewhere in the once-a-year phase. "Slaughterhouse Five" is another I read with some regularity, and I find it different every time I read it, as I have a new set of personal beliefs with which to apply to it approximately every time.
- Tenhundfeld 12y ago
  WRT "The Princess Bride", I've read it a few times as well. My perspective is slightly different, reading it after watching the movie many times. I agree that it "has its own sort of whimsy", especially in the context or meta-story, but when I first read it, I was struck by how similar the humor is to the movie. If memory serves me, almost all of the memorable lines and jokes from the movie come word-for-word from the book. I'd assumed some of the jokes, e.g., those by Miracle Max (Billy Crystal) or Fezzik (Andre the Giant), were adapted to suit the actors. But they weren't. I don't know if that speaks to the quality of the writing or the casting or what.
- ashark 12y ago
  PRINCESS BRIDE (THE BOOK) SPOILERS The great thing about it, IMO, is that the novel's not about the story from the movie, really, but nevertheless you can do to it what the protagonist is doing to the fictional Princess Bride book and tell it to your kids as if it were the movie, by skipping the "boring parts", i.e. the important parts if you're reading it as an adult. It's a great and funny adventure story for kids, wrapped in a melancholy meditation on relationships with children and recapturing lost time and experiences for adults[1], which is (rightly) absent from the movie. The story itself tells you how to adapt it for reading to kids. It's its own instruction manual. I absolutely love the notion of a kid picking up the book as an adult, expecting the story their parents read to them, and being surprised by the discovery of the real story, hidden from them in exactly the same way the bits about economics and such were from the protagonist. It's simply brilliant, and a scenario I fully intend to set up for my kids :-) [1] This is from memory—I read it several years ago, and if I revisit it I'm sure my take would have more nuance now, and would find this to be an embarrassing misreading or oversimplification.

JSeymourATL 12y ago

Recalling Paul Graham's recent blog post on the benefits of re-reading: reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time. The same book would get compiled differently at different points in your life. Which means it is very much worth reading important books multiple times. I always used to feel some misgivings about rereading books. I unconsciously lumped reading together with work like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you did it wrong the first time. Whereas now the phrase "already read" seems almost ill-formed. http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html

SCHiM 12y ago

One line in the article piqued my interest, as it echoes something I read somewhere else. Seeing as it comes from someone who is an absolute expert on the subject makes it even more interesting. > "In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved..." It has been noted that this type of recursion/layering is something that we can't help but be intrigued by. This subject is explored in great detail, and unparalleled depth, in the book Gödel, Escher, Bach[0] by Douglas Hofstadter. He notes that this doesn't only happen in stories and is a common theme in music as well and may even be the root of what we call 'intelligence'. I think he's definitively on the right track, and I thoroughly recommend his book to anyone that has even a passing interest in mathematics, logic, philosophy, programming, music or psychology. Of all the books I have read GEB has had the most profound impact on my life in terms of how much it made me think and evaluate the world around me and the ideas inside the book. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

rspeer 12y ago
I've found that GEB is a great book to read and re-read. Not only will the math be more accessible the second time around, but the text also conceals numerous "easter eggs" that you might only find on subsequent readings, or might never find. I've done in-person GEB reading groups where I learned lots of things from my co-readers. I've tried to replicate that experience online at http://www.reddit.com/r/geb http://www.reddit.com/r/geb, and there have been cases where other people have pointed out interesting things, but it's hard to get discussion going beyond the beginning of the book. Unfortunately, it seems right now that people who want to follow-up on GEB ideas go to YouTube, where the conversation is disconnected enough that facile and wrong conclusions thrive. (No, a crab canon is not a Mobius strip. Some dude on YouTube made that up. It's not real.)
MarkPNeyer 12y ago
i've read Gödel, Escher, Bach cover-to-cover three times. the first time, in high school, it opened my eyes to a bunch of cool ideas, and jump-started my interested in computer science. i didn't 'get it' at all. i knew there was a bunch of neat topics, but the idea that there was any overall theme was lost. the second time, in college, i started to understand the musical content a bit more, and started understanding that there was a 'bigger picture' the author was trying to paint. i still wasn't sure what that was. the third time, after college, I think i finally understood what the author was getting at - his model for consciousness. this was also the second time i'd read the introduction. that book has done a lot to help me understand the world, and particularly the structure of my own thoughts. i don't know if consciousness _always_ works the way he suggests it does, but i've found a lot of utility in viewing myself as a recursive tangled loop, where physical symbols reflecting the external world started reflecting their reflection of it.

searine 12y ago

One of the few books I've ever re-read more than once was Neal Stephenson's Anathem. I've read it four or five times now. There is always something new to find in it.

CocaKoala 12y ago
A lot of Neal Stephenson's work holds up to rereadings. I've gone through the Baroque Cycle + Cryptonomicon maybe three times now, and I guess I'm due for a fourth soon.
- rkroondotnet 12y ago
  The Baroque Cycle is an undertaking, since my first read of it I have moved on to the audio books, subway listening being easier than subway reading. Cryptonomicon I am at about 15 reads (including audio book listens a few more), and maybe a handful for Snow Crash, Anathem and Reamde. My book of choice for re-reading is Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, by Jeffrey Archer. I must be at 50 re-reads of that now, and I own two first editions. Strange what catches your mind!
- vitamen 12y ago
  I read Snow Crash once a year (usually I listen to the audiobook these days) but I'm thinking of switching up to the Baroque Cycle. I'm glad there's finally an unabridged Cryptonomicon audiobook - for a long time there was not.

segmondy 12y ago

I've read Hackers by Steven Levy at least 30 times. I should schedule a reading soon. The book is as exciting each time I reread it, strangest thing!

cllns 12y ago

The author of this piece, Stephen Marche, has a great essay that appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books site last summer, called "The Literature of the Second Gilded Age" [1]: https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-second-gilded-age https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/literature-second-gilded-a...

geebee 12y ago

What a good article. Interestingly, I read this just after reading Bob Dylan's pretty fascinating speech (delivered ac couple of days ago at musicales. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-grammys-2015-transcript-of-bob-dylans-musicares-person-of-year-speech-20150207-story.html#page=1 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-gr... Bob Dylan stresses the importance of how many times he listened to a song and how much of an influence it had on what he wrote: "For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once. If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand." If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too. " Dylan says this repeatedly about many of his songs (I really do recommend reading his speech). I do think there's some merit to this (though of course I don't think it's quite that simple). It's also interesting to keep something in mind. It's easy to do some things 100 times, it's harder to do other things 100 times. I've listened to plenty of songs 100 times - I think the interesting thing about Dylan was that he was listening to these songs with an unusual engagement, and that they were (at the time) somewhat unusual songs to be listening to 100 times. I'd say it's hard to read Joyce's Ulysses 100 times, but Ulysses isn't an undiscovered work. Probably the real key is to listen to or read something 100 times that people don't realize understand the value of quite yet and that takes considerable time and effort to understand. That takes some passion, and a willingness to be considered a bit odd.

drostie 12y ago

I've read the ten Amber books by Roger Zelazny all the way through ten times, which sorta-counts. A total read-through of those books can be done in a 3-day weekend if you read the whole day, so if you want a rough idea of the time commitment of a centireading, it's about a month of day-long readings. Another way to view it is a task of reading two books a week for a year. Like the Zelazny books, you need to have something which has the right "flow" for you to really make it work. My English professor at Cornell was fond of saying, "There is no good writing, only good rewriting. There is no good reading, only good rereading." He calls to mind how it's easier and more powerful to condense and re-articulate your article/book when you know where it starts, where it ends, and how it gets from A to B: then he comments, so too you get a greater appreciation of the details of what you're reading when you can see the overall story. In the case of the Roger Zelazny books, there was one section in particular where this happened. We see a flashback from Merlin's perspective to a time when he is a teenager and he takes his all-to-human girlfriend on an insane journey through impossible landscapes which putatively exist just-next-door. In the discussion that follows, it seems like, by not telling her his secret, he's shutting her out: What could I say? It was not only that telling her of Shadow would disturb, perhaps destroy, her view of reality. At the heart of my problem lay the realization that it would also require telling her how I knew this, which would mean telling her who I am, where I am from, what I am--and I was afraid to give her this knowledge. I told myself that it would end our relationship as surely as telling her nothing would; and if it must end either way, I would rather we parted without her possessing this knowledge. Later, much later, I was to see this for the rationalization it was; my real reason for denying her the answers she desired was that I was not ready to trust her, or anyone, so close to me as I really am. Had I known her longer, better--another year, say--I might have answered her. I don't know. We never used the word "love," though it must have run through her mind on occasion, as it did through mine. It was, I suppose, that I didn't love her enough to trust her, and then it was too late. So, "I can't tell you," were my words. "You have some power that you will not share." "Call it that, then." "I would do whatever you say, promise whatever you want promised." "There is a reason, Julia." She is on her feet, arms akimbo. "And you won't even share that." I shake my head. "It must be a lonely world you inhabit, magician, if even those who love you are barred from it." At that moment it seems she is simply trying her last trick for getting an answer from me. I screw my resolve yet tighter. "I didn't say that." "You didn't have to. It is your silence that tells me. If you know the road to Hell too, why not head that way? Good-bye!" "Julia. Don't..." She chooses not to hear me. Still life with flowers... If you're just reading through this, it seems perhaps like she's gone power-hungry; you sympathize with Merlin. But read through it again. Pay particular attention to that sentence in the first paragraph: we never used the word "love", and then just consider the exchange, "It must be a lonely world you inhabit, magician, if even those who love you are barred from it." / "I didn't say that." On rereading, you realize that from her perspective, she's jumping out into vulnerable territory, using this word which they've never used before, and when he shuts her down, from her perspective he's basically saying "I didn't say that I loved you."

abruzzi 12y ago

I don't count my rereading, but for good books, once is never enough. When I got the the end of "Satanic Verses" for the first time, I was so taken, I started it again the very next day. Similar with "Against the Day". If I had to guess, the most rereads I've done is ~20-30 rereads of "Cats Cradle". Part of the reason for that is it is such an easy read, and I can usually finish it in a day or two. Its also a great novel. I'd like to say I've read "Gravity's Rainbow" that many times, but for its density, having read it four or five times is a feat unto itself.

doki_pen 12y ago

I keep reading The Idiot and Walden. The nice thing is that after you read a book a few times, you can just open to any page and start reading. Walden is especially good for random selection.

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ommunist 12y ago

Upvoting this. Because the book always stays the same. Its the reader who changes.

personlurking 12y ago

I've never read a book more than once, not even a comic book when I was a kid. I have, though, seen cerebral films (pretty much my favorite kind) as many as 5-15 times each. What I haven't seen anyone mention here in the comments, is reading several books on the same subject, but from different perspectives. IE, 2-3 history books, by different authors, on the same country and era. This is something I have done and do get a bit of enjoyment out of.

jkaunisv1 12y ago
I really enjoyed taking that approach to the Vietnam war. It was edifying to read a general who was there describe the exact same events as a journalist writing post-9/11, yet only the location and time matched up. It made their biases stand out so starkly.

normloman 12y ago

I'm gonna read 50 Shades of Gray 100 times. Then I'll truly understand the profound message that EL James was trying to say.

legacy2013 12y ago

I was involved with theater when I was younger, and would always read the script 50-60 times outside of rehersal. Halfway through a 4 month production, I would not only know my lines, but they would come to me naturally, leading me to interact as if I was that character. The book I've probably read the most is One of the Eragon books.... last count I was at 24 read through. I really love that book. You do notice something different every time

Animats 12y ago

This is the process used by some religions to induce obsessive religious behavior in their members.

assholesRppl2 12y ago
And the same process used by the Sun to keep us waking up every day! Damn you, Sun, you religious zealot! Sorry, I've had too much coffee, and I'm an asshole. But my point still stands: just because some process may analogously resemble something else, it doesn't mean it's the same process. The end goals are different.

shalmanese 12y ago

Other similar experiments include Cinema 52, where a group of people agreed to watch the same movie, once a week for a year. Top Gun the first year, Back to the Future the second year and Avatar the third year: http://www.cinema52.com/the-experiment/ http://www.cinema52.com/the-experiment/ Also The Lawrence Julie & Julia project where one guy decided to watch the movie Julie and Julia every single day for an entire year: http://www.lawrenceandjulieandjulia.com/ http://www.lawrenceandjulieandjulia.com/

towelguy 12y ago
Reminded me of this https://xkcd.com/915/ https://xkcd.com/915/
bakul 12y ago
To truly appreciate rewatching they should've watched The Groundhog Day every week for a year. Followed by 50 First Dates!
- shortimer 12y ago
  I've watched Groundhog Day probably 100 times. For six or so months, I left it on repeat on the main house TV (I lived alone at the time).

nsomaru 12y ago

Re-reading is good, but shouldn't we remember that time is also limited? What I'm saying is: all books are not equal. Hamlet == Jeeves? Also, there are different kinds of reading. Sometimes I'm just "consuming content," and others I'm actually reading. In the former case, I get a dull sort of continuous pleasure. In the latter, it's more like I'm engaging on a journey with the author, which happens in fiction a lot, but the best kicks come from philosophy. A single paragraph from Schopenhauer[] may contain such high signal (to me), the it requires careful scrutiny and thought. This kind of reading is engaging with the text, but I'm not sure that it would be worth it in the case of Jeeves. Why go looking for water in the (relative) desert when you can visit the ocean? [] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8915729 for Schopenhauer's essay /On Thinking for Yourself/. It's a great read for anyone who wants some well presented thoughts about reading itself and its relation to thinking. Highly recommended!

bathMarm0t 12y ago
That essay seems far too hardlined. "Reading is nothing more than a substitute for thought of one’s own." -S Really? I'm going to agree that your "consuming content" fits this bill (in all mediums mind you. Mindlessly doing anything fits this bill), but I've taken to reading used books with red pen, and scarring the pages with excerpts, thoughts, counterpoints, interpretations, etc. I view that as an absolutely critical part of reading now. "and it may sometimes happen that he could have found it [some great truth] all ready to hand in a book and spared himself the trouble." -S You don't FIND these truths in books. The books bring out and expose the truths that lie in your experience. Take, for example, reading the classics in high school (Heart of Darkness, Gatsby, Crime and Punishment, etc). Those books meant notheng to me. My experiential quorum was unmet. I couldn't even vote on whether these topics were relevant (let alone true). It was only after I experienced, felt, lived. Only after being could the books show themselves. The authors feel the same way you feel, they just put it better. More succinctly. We all have the ingredients, they just know how to simmer things. Compare Schopenhauer with Hemingway (Death in the Afternoon) "People in a novel, not skillfully constructed characters, must be projected from the writer’s assimilated experience, from his knowledge, from his head, from his heart and from all there is of him. If he ever has luck as well as seriousness and gets them out entire they will have more than one dimension and they will last a long time. A good writer should know as near everything as possible. Naturally he will not. A great enough writer seems to be born with knowledge. But he really is not; he has only been born with the ability to learn in a quicker ratio to the passage of time than other men and without conscious application, and with an intelligence to accept or reject what is already presented as knowledge. There are some things which cannot be learned quickly and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave. Every novel which is truly written contributes to the total of knowledge which is there at the disposal of the next writer who comes, but the next writer must pay, always, a certain nominal percentage in experience to be able to understand and assimilate what is available as his birthright and what he must, in turn, take his departure from." -H

smoyer 12y ago

As in "Fahrenheit 451", if you're going to read something 100 times, take pains to memorize it along the way (it's not as hard as it sounds with practice).

RockofStrength 12y ago

Reading deeply vs. reading widely- an interesting debate question.

nether 12y ago

Why reading 100 books is much better.

WalterBright 12y ago

Reminds me of the academic who knew everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet, had thoroughly analyzed it, its roots, context, etc. And who'd throw it all away for the joy of reading it for the first time.

rossta 12y ago

I'll let you all know what I think after I've read the article 100 times.

GoofballJones 12y ago

I'm sorry, I can't subscribe to this idea. I have a finite time in my life, and there are way too many books for me to read. There are so many books I want to read that it's literally going to take me a lifetime as it is...so every book I re-read is a new book I'll never get to read.

gitpusher 12y ago

He never really substantiates the article's title. Why exactly is it a great idea? That is, why read a single text 100 times rather than reading a greater variety? Its benefits seem limited to niche situations (such as an actor re-reading a script, or a lawyer re-reading some legislation, or an academic re-reading Hamlet). I do feel that certain books deserve (nay, DEMAND) a re-reading, in order to fully appreciate their content. But 5-10 times is entirely sufficient for the layperson, unless you're writing a dissertation on the topic. I'd much prefer to read MORE books, than a single book again and again!

scott_s 12y ago
Because it's comforting.

zer0defex 12y ago

I do this with audiobooks all the time. It's easier to passsively listen to books I've already read since you can miss parts and still know what's going on. I never really intended to "learn" the books, but I've definitely noticed improvements in how much info seems to be available in my active memory. Really quite useful as it lets you connect related concepts in meetings and chatting much faster. Seth Goden just wrote a blog post about it actually: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/can-sound-waves-change-your-life.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/can-sound-wa...

louprado 12y ago

For those who primarily read engineering and technical texts, do you find you have an unusually low reading speed when switching to ordinary literature ? I expected reading-speed to be 1:1 inversely proportional idea-density, but that never happens. Any suggestions for a techie who wants to read faster ?

jessermeyer 12y ago
http://www.spritzlet.com/ http://www.spritzlet.com/

pitt1980 12y ago

wrong thread, sorry

ygmelnikova 12y ago

tl;dr

ygmelnikova 12y ago
So much negativity on this comment. It's a statement. This is the generation of tl;dr. SAT scores are down, IQs are down since the Victorian age by 10 points. What percentage of the population would read the entirety of that article, let alone a single book 100 times? That comment is both sarcastic and ironic. Perfect.

wazoox 12y ago

Books I've read many, many times and plan to reread again: Umberto Eco's Foucault's pendulum. Homer's Odyssey. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. These never gets old :)

benten10 12y ago
...Focault's pendulum... did you 'attempt' to read it six different times, or do six complete scans of it? I ask because every time I pick the book up again, I seem to read only half of what needs to be read. Ideally, a binary algorithm like that would finish in logarithmic of the book's pages times, but it seems to get longer every time. Amazing book though. I just...can't seem to finish it. Eco and Rushdie are my two biggest heroes. Now Rushdie's books, them I've read thrice for almost all of them. Except the much-hated Satanic Verses, which I've read twice that many times. It gets better every time its read.
- wazoox 12y ago
  Foucault's pendulum: I love that book. The adventures of Casaubon and al entertain me to no end. I've read it many, many times cover to cover, I've typed in (in 1987) and run the BASIC program generating God's name, I've read encyclopedias for details on the countless trivia in the book. really it's my favorite Eco. It's so clever you feel smart just reading it, it's so choke full with interesting stuff, so funny and ironic and meta-referential...

superuser2 12y ago

I'm a stage manager. It's certainly true that the relationship theater practitioners form with a script is much deeper and more rewarding than the experience a casual reader forms with a novel, and a large part of that is familiarity. I'll read a play 5-6 times in preproduction alone, between an initial read for pleasure, close reading for technical requirements, an inevitably slow read to type an electronic copy, several proofreads of my electronic copy, proofreading of the director's cut, etc. There's a table readthrough first thing after the play is cast, and then (if there's a long gap of time) another one at the first rehearsal. And then there's rehearsal. The director and actors figure out at each moment 1) what does each character want, 2) what prior action in the play made them want it, 3) what is the obstacle preventing them from getting it, 4) how does saying a line contribute to overcoming that obstacle, etc. You don't necessarily talk about this for every single line, but anywhere it's not obvious, it will be discussed. (Different directors have different styles, but everything I've seen is a variation on this.) They also do a fair amount of "table work" and homework assignments where actors invent their characters' backstories, prior relationships, etc. I sit through all of this, and it's my job to be reading so that I can prompt and correct lines, as well as (silently) figure out that a designer should know about something, and add it to my report. We usually visit each moment 3-4 times in this phase. So that's 3-4 very close reads. Then we start running larger chunks - groups of scenes, then acts, then the entire show. All told, probably about 7-8 passes through the show. I'm still on book, and I'm getting a sense of how the pieces fit together. We periodically go back to detail work on parts that the director is unsatisfied with. And then tech. 2-3 full tech runs where I am completely engaged and in the moment, calling cues. And then 7-8 performances, but that's cause it's educational theater. In a professional setting, there could be a hundred. At the end of it, I know Streetcar. I have most of it memorized, I know what everything means and why it's said, I know who everyone is and what their intentions are, I know how the plot fits together, I know how the words are supposed to sound, I know the pulse. At the end of my run, I had probably read it 50 times. People outside of theater/film don't really read anything 50 times. I have a lot deeper and more rewarding relationship with Streetcar than you do with Crime and Punishment, and >50 passes through the script probably helped. But spending dozens-hundreds of hours listening to professionals pick apart the text and develop meaning from it probably contributed too.

tsotha 12y ago

All I can think is your time must have very little value if you can read nontrivial books 100 times.

ternaryoperator 12y ago

In the centuries before books became cheap and mass produced, a family would own only a handful of books. These books tended to be passed around and reread repeatedly. The modern period of being read widely was preceded by one of being read deeply.

vedant 12y ago

To anyone who might adopt "centireading" as a neologism, just want to point out that the correct SI prefix for 100x is "hecto." "Centi" is a hundredth of something, not a hundred something. Tons of people are "centi"-readers; they make it through four pages of a four-hundred-page book.

thret 12y ago

Wouldn't it be better to simply memorise a book rather than reread it so many times? I absolutely gain a greater appreciation for poetry after I memorise it, I'm sure it is not so different to the experience he's talking about.

hagan_das 12y ago

Lots of books I want to reread but hard to justify when I already have more books on my "to-read" list than I can read in a lifetime. I do, however, try and re-read Dune once a year. Off-topic but since I've got books on the brain: I recently started reading the Foundation and am kicking myself for not reading it sooner.