On our coffee table, you'll currently find a heaping scoop of news consisting of The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, TIME, and The Economist. With a continuous supply of news magazines and newspapers, it's quite difficult to keep up with them. I finally got around to reading a 2 week old edition of Newsweek which covers what we should be reading now. Within the cover story is an opinion essay on the guilty pleasures of re-reading favorites. Since I've been home, I've read 3 novels and am on my 4th, 3 of which I'm re-reading: Middlesex, The Memory Keeper's Daughter (first time), Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre (currently). I love the comfort of re-reading books, but often feel I should be reading something new, which I do, but not often enough. Part of my reason for re-visiting some novels is that many of the classics I was forced to read in high school I either never read or don't remember. So I've been trying to (re-)read many of them and have found myself loving them now. For instance, I hated Pride and Prejudice, I just couldn't get past the banter of the first 20 pages, but now I love it and re-read it every year. That's how I felt about Great Expectations this summer, its a great novel (if the picture doesn't make sense, you should read the book!). I'm not as an obsessive repeater as David Gates, author of the article, but I do enjoy re-discovering characters and all the themes that I may have missed the first time around. To those who say repeating books is a waste of time when you could be discovering something new, try repeating a neglected novel on your book shelf and you'll be surprised by how much there is still to discover.
(The more appropriate question for me right now is when I'm going to put down the leisure readings and get back to 'serious' development readings)
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