On rereading, marginalia, and a lifelong reading practice
Why rereading matters
I’ve never understood the argument that rereading takes time away from new books. Most of the books that matter to me became important on the second or third reading, not the first.
The first time I reread Frankenstein, I was looking for something I’d missed. The second time, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just wanted to be back in it. That’s when I understood that rereading isn’t a corrective; it’s a return. The book is the same. You aren’t. What changes between readings is everything you’ve lived in the gap.
Some people find rereading hard to justify. There are too many books, and time is finite, and you already know how it ends. I’ve heard all of this. It has never quite convinced me. A reread is where annotation becomes useful. The notes you made years ago stop being notes and become evidence. You can stop tracking plot and start hearing everything else.
Writing in the margins is how I stay honest with a book. An underline means I noticed something. A question mark means I don’t believe it. A word circled in the margin three chapters later means I finally understood what the earlier passage was doing.
People sometimes object to marking books. It’s disrespectful, they say. You’re supposed to preserve the book exactly as it is. I’ve never found this persuasive. The notes I leave are a record of a conversation, not a defacement. When I pick up a marked book years later, I’m reading two things at once: the text, and whoever I was when I first came to it. Sometimes I agree with those old notes. Sometimes I’ve moved so far from them that I can barely remember what I was thinking. Both are useful.
Marginalia doesn’t make you a better reader in any measurable sense. It makes you a more present one. The act of writing something down, even just a dash in the margin, means you stopped. You paid attention. That’s what the practice is really for.
A reading life builds itself through return more than accumulation. The books you go back to, the passages you find yourself quoting without looking them up, the novels that keep arriving in your mind at odd moments are the ones doing the real work.
Not every book earns a second read. Most shouldn’t. But the ones that do are often the books that were slightly ahead of me the first time, books I respected more than I understood, or understood more than I was ready to feel. Rereading closes that gap, or opens a new one.
Over time, a marked-and-reread shelf becomes something like a record of who you’ve been. It’s a record, not a performance.
Where to go next
If rereading has become part of your reading life, you might also enjoy Why I keep reading, even when life is loud, where I write about books as a source of steadiness during difficult seasons. Books that linger explores why some books refuse to leave us long after we’ve finished them, while What it means to read without rules looks at permission, curiosity, and building a reading life that isn’t driven by obligation. For more essays in this vein, visit the Reading Life hub.
