I will occasionally go back and reread stories last touched many years ago. In 2012 I reread Walter Jon William space opera Dread Empire’s Fall trilogy, and an updated omnibus version of John Shirley’s Song of Youth trilogy. Previous years’ rereads include the usual suspects: the Dune series, Hyperion Cantos, Lord of the Rings, et al.

I love re-reading books that touched me and only don’t do it more often because I’m always chasing the authors I haven’t gotten to yet. It’s a good habit to see what actually holds up. That The Hobbit continues to match my nostalgia for its voice, characterization and themes every single year is that testament to ultimate craft.

Other works that handle re-reads: Heaney’s Beowulf translation; Marquez’s “Handsomest Drowned Man in the World;” Welty’s “Where Is That Voice Coming From?;” Stephen King’s Desperation.

Some of the books and series that I’ve re-read lately include The Hyperion Cantos, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Hitchhiker’s Guide, a bunch of classic SF, some B5 tie-ins and a couple non-genre novels. This year should be no different, but I’m not quite sure what will eventually wind up on the TBR-R pile.

It can remind you of what you liked when you read it the first time, and so give you an idea of what you might want to recapture now in your reading/writing. It can point out stylistic tricks that you might want to include/avoid in your writing now – what works and what doesn’t work!

It can also put your present reading into context – how much of your books would make less sense without an idea/grounding in the background of superheroes/crime noir?

For those reasons I would suggest that rereading can be useful, and fun! Not exclusively, though, and it is a balance.

I used to be a much more avid re-reader than I am now. I credit, or blame, the interactivity of the internet, making reading a more social activity than it was prior to the book-blogging craze, for my tendency to want to a)read more new stuff as it comes out and b) read for the first time many of the classics of SFF that I never got around to reading when I was growing up.

Like Ms. McGuire, I don’t find myself having any tapering off of affection for the books I re-read. That may be in part because I don’t re-read everything, must those books I cherish. From my childhood reading my re-reads include the first 5 novels in the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, Brian Daley’s Han Solo novels, A World Out of Time by Larry Niven and Dracula by Bram Stoker. I’ve re-read all of those enough times that I’ve lost count and I learn something new, or see something differently, each time I re-read them. Revisiting those worlds brings the comfort of spending time with good friends.

In my later years I’ve read books like The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion and have since re-read them and will re-read them again and again in my lifetime, I suspect. They have a poetry to them that resonates through me as I read them and after a certain amount of time has passed I find myself aching to re-read them. Non-SFF related I enjoy re-reading L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books, which are books that I first read in my 20′s along with my wife when we were first married. I am very fond of their sweetness and cannot find any reason not to be enamored of a redhead with a vivid imagination who loves to read.

I re-read Neil Gaiman’s books often and have done so with Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, also Susanna Clarke’s short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

- Animorphs by K. A. Applegate. A series of about 70 novels or so about a group of teenage kids who find an alien in a construction site (his ship crashes there) and he ends up giving them the ability to shapeshift into animals, aliens, humans etc. These six kids end up being the frontline troops against aliens (different from above) who are parasitic slugs that can crawl into your body and take over your brain. I love this series. The books told from the perspective of the social outcast Tobias are my favourites, as I could often relate to him at the time.

- Hardy Boys by Franklin W. Dixon & Nancy Drew by Carolyn Keene. Teen mysteries? I’m all up for that! I read a ton of these as a kid and every now and then I re-read some of my favourites.

- Lord of the Rings / Silmarillion. The whole experience is stunning. I don’t re-read them as often as I’d like, but I do watch all the movies (extended editions) every year.

There are some Warhammer 40,000/Warhammer Fantasy novels I re-read now and then, mostly stuff by William King, Graham McNeill, Nathan Long, and Ben Counter. They are all among my favourite authors.

Some Star Wars stuff, like the Thrawn novels, or the Obi-Wan “YA” novels often get re-read too. Currently in the middle of re-reading the Stackpole/Allston X-Wing novels.