Read It Again, Sam

Lots of authors reread their favorite books. Again. And again and again.

From a piece in the New York Times...

Lots of writers reread their favorite books — and not just once or twice. Stephen King, who wears a T-shirt with the slogan Quot libros, quam breve tempus (“So many books, so little time”), has read “Lord of the Flies” eight or nine times, he said via e-mail, and “Lord of the Rings” three or four. King has also read Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love” and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” three or four times each; James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity” four or five times; and John D. MacDonald’s 1960 thriller “The End of the Night” some half a dozen times. Of that book, about a college dropout’s killing spree, King said: “It’s one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. This is a novel Émile Zola would have relished.”

Writers are not the only ones who reread books, of course. In her recently published “On Rereading,” the retired English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks cites a friend who “claimed that she hated to reread. When I pointed out that I have known her to reread Jane Austen, she looked surprised. ‘Everyone rereads Jane Austen.’ ” (Everyone who reads her in the first place, maybe: King said in his e-mail that “I have never read a single word of Jane Austen.”)