How to Reread a Book

The Foundation

First, learn how to read books, rather than just looking at the pages as if they contained pictures of words. As Ryan Holiday would say, devour them. Start here.

At this point, there are two books I highly recommend: How to Read a Book and How to Read and Why. They are different but complementary–Bloom examines in detail a number of works and shows more by example; Adler’s is more of a guidebook, and explores not only how to read literature, but science, math and philosophy. Both are great.

The Review

Review all of the notes you made and passages you highlighted. Not only will you have the themes and major points fresh in your mind, you will have re-immersed yourself in the author’s world, becoming more sensitive to their tone and intent. This is important for the next step.

Forget what you’ve highlighted. Don’t skip over the passages, but rather desensitize yourself to their significance for the time being. I’m not sure about you, but when I see neon yellow, my mind yells “IMPORTANT” and sometimes this causes me to skim through the surrounding text. We already did that. Our job now is to recognize subtlety, to pick up what we missed before.

Some might consider a different color highlighter or pen for subsequent readings, but I think this is going overboard. It’s easy to obsess over methodology and “systems” and forget the reason you’re doing this in the first place. I call that Resistance 2.0. Simplicity is better.

Consilience

There’s nothing wrong with rereading a book for pleasure. This is useful too, especially if you’re a writer. It helps you understand how the author elicits those feelings. But the main reason is consilience.

I realize I may not be using this word in a rigorous, academic sense, but the concept has always appealed to me. Unity itself is an alluring concept within any field (ask a string theorist), but even more appealing stretched among them.

Here is a corny analogy to explain why I read: I believe that every time you gain understanding, it flattens the horizon a little. This never happens completely, and never will for any human, but as your line of sight improves, you start to see things that were once hidden. This is an exponential process.

From that, you can understand why we reread a book. To see the connections that were invisible before.