How many books do we get to read in our lifetime?
According to the Pew Research Center, Americans read about 12 books per year on average, while half read less than 4 books per year.
That means someone who consistently reads 4 books per year between the ages of 20 to 85 will have a reading list of 260 books by the end of their lives while a person reading 12 books per year will finish 780 books in their lifetime.
In comparison, there are over a million books published across different platforms each year in the US alone.
Of those books, around 500 make it to The New York Times best seller’s list each year, the most prominent best seller’s list in the world.
There are not only too many books being published yearly for any one person to read but there are too many great books to consume, if you use the best sellers list as a measure of quality.
This is without even mentioning book recommendations from friends, online forums, book awards and the backlog of incredible classics that have stood the test of time.
Until recent years I had never considered re-reading a book for a second, or third time precisely for this reason.
There are so many interesting books available and my reading list grows faster than I can keep up with, why would I ever go back to an old book when there are countless new ones that pique my interest?
Why Re-reading Books Is Valuable
To properly address this question, it helps to break books up into two large categories: fiction and non-fiction.
Fiction
There is an old adage saying that great fiction often speaks more to the truths of life than reality itself because stories are able to put a magnifying glass on specific aspects of the human experience and dissect them in a way that doesn’t happen in real life.
Some works of fiction contain important lessons that have a deep impact on the reader’s perspective and actions. Great novels are worth re-reading to be reminded of these lessons.
Beauty and entertainment also hold intrinsic value. Maybe you just want to re-visit a novel to catch up with characters that you loved and get lost in a great story. There is a sense of comfort that comes with knowing the plot of a story as you read it. It can allow you to savour the nuances of its prose in a different way, and come out of the book with a fresh takeaway.
Non-fiction
Non-fiction books are consumed in a different way than novels. Be it a biography, a self-help book or a collection of information on a specific topic, we often pick up a non-fiction book because we want to learn something.
On the rare occasion that you strike gold and find a book that really hits the spot. Chances are, you have actually retained a very small portion of the information it contains.
It has become easier than ever to revisit important parts of books with e-reader highlights and online book excerpts, but there is no substitute for taking another deep dive into a topic to be reacquainted with its secrets and intricacies.
As with fiction, reading a great non-fiction book at a different moment in our lives can bring forth valuable nuggets of information that we had glossed over the last time we picked it up. A book that we thought had nothing else to give can be impactful once more.
I like to log the books that I’ve read and loved with a prescription note attached to them.
Read this book when feeling scattered.
Read that book when you need to feel like anything is possible.
These simple notes have been helpful to keep track of books I’ve loved and how they have impacted me when I first read them.
Sure enough, I will get a similar benefit from reading the book as I did when I first picked it up. However, time will inevitably do its magic and reveal something new with each read.
Time Over Shine
As a general rule, I try to avoid reading new books that have flashy marketing campaigns and generate a lot of buzz until at least a year goes by. There are rare exceptions to this personal rule, but in my experience time is a better judge of a book’s value than sales numbers and awards.
If a 30-year-old book is still relevant today, there must be something worth reading on those pages. Classics are classics for a reason and I will take timeless beauty over a shiny new turd any day of the week.
Three Books Worth Reading Again And Again
The three following books have been on my yearly re-reading list for a while now. They never fail to deliver useful insights with each read.
Essentialism: For when life is overwhelming and I don’t know where to begin
Essentialism is the continuous discipline of defining where we can create the most value in our lives and spending our limited time executing in those spheres.
This incredible book by Greg Mckeown has had a profound impact on my life.
As a curious dreamer, I use to spend a huge amount of time dabbling in a thousand different things and accomplishing little to nothing on all of them year after year. This would leave me feeling tired, useless and deflated.
The main object of this book is to show you how to gain control over your life and make sure that you are spending your energy where it matters most. Mckeown drives this message home by showing us how to choose the few things that are truly meaningful to us, pick these out from the noise and understand that we will have to make certain trade-offs to get where we want to be.
There is a specific exercise from this book that has been especially useful to me over the past few years: the quarterly personal off-site.
In the business world, an “off-site” is a retreat where decision-makers from a company will go to a location outside of their usual work setting to focus on big issues that need to be resolved and develop visionary ideas that will drive them forward for years to come.
Mckeown brings this exercise back to an individual level. He recommends getting out of the house or office once per quarter to have a meeting with yourself and set personal priorities and vision for the next three months. He sums this up very neatly:
“…every three months, take three hours to identify three things you want to accomplish over the next three months.”
The off-site part is key because it takes us out of our usual setting and helps to avoid being distracted by trivial interruptions. I like using pen and paper to brainstorm during these sessions. No computer, no music and definitely no cell phone.
Having 20 priorities is the same as having no priorities and if you don’t identify your own, someone else will. This book is the first step to establishing yours.
The War of Art: For when the resistance is winning
The War of Art is a small but mighty book. It cuts to the chase and gives you the kick in the ass that you need to stop whining so that you can get to work on the creative pursuit you’ve been procrastinating on.
The most remarkable part of this modern classic for me is how Steven Pressfield paints the resistance that we feel when trying to accomplish anything outside of our comfort zone as a sentient being. Resistance is the mortal enemy of all of your hopes and dreams and the villain that employs all sorts of tricks and schemes to keep you from doing your work.
On the flip side, Pressfield describes the Muse as “the collective identity of the nine goddesses, sisters, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), whose charge it is to inspire artists”.
Describing Resistance and the Muse as entities that live outside of our own resolve to get things done is immensely liberating. Accepting that these entities will do their thing and exist regardless of our own actions removes a ton of pressure. This does not however mean that we are helpless and that success will either happen to us or not.
Pressfield advocates that discipline is the key to fighting resistance and letting the muse into your life. Although Resistance is fighting you each step of the way and the elusive Muse may not show up to deliver your next book idea, we, the mortals, are still in control of our outcomes.
He illustrates this in an entertaining way by telling his personal history of struggle with Resistance during the decades he spent writing before publishing his first notable work, The Legend Of Bagger Vance when he was in his 50s. He’s managed to keep the enemy at bay and publish over 20 books since then.
By showing up every day to do our work, no matter what, we are able to fight the Resistance and allow the Muse to enter our lives.
The Obstacle is the way: For when things get hard and I feel sorry for myself
Ryan Holiday has done a phenomenal job of decanting the works of ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca the Younger into a concise, actionable book that is easy to read and contains modern examples of timeless principles.
The Obstacle Is The Way is a book that I read when I feel like the world is against me and that I have no agency over the challenges in my life. This quote from the author evokes the core essence of the Stoic message beautifully:
“There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception, There is the event itself and the story that we tell ourselves about what it means”.
The key takeaway that I get from this read is that there will always be difficult things to get through in life. Oftentimes, anything worth doing takes you down of path of struggle and doubt.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t strive.
Hard things happen for us and not to us. We always have control over our actions and reactions, it’s all a matter of perspective.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, I strongly recommend reading the original Meditations from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca’s Letters From A Stoic. These ancient texts have held up incredibly well and still deliver timeless wisdom.
Life’s Too Short To Finish Crappy Books
If we don’t have enough time on our hands to read through the flood of good new books that come out each year, we certainly don’t have time to struggle through bad ones.
Revisiting an old book that you know for a fact will give you something back for the time invested in reading its prose is much more useful than finishing a book that you don’t love.
Be it a non-fiction book full of helpful wisdom or a captivating novel that brings you joy, you will most likely find some new perspective on subsequent reads.
It’s still a struggle at times, but I’ve learned to allow myself to put down books that don’t grab my attention and curiosity.
Reading a book is an intimate experience. We spend hours with their stories and the characters on the page, real or make-believe. I wouldn’t force myself to hang out with someone I don’t like so why would I force myself through a book that doesn’t resonate with me?
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of the sunken cost fallacy with half-read books. The more time spent reading a book, the harder it becomes to abandon it. It’s so easy to think “I’ve gotten this far, might as well suck it up and finish.”
Don’t.
Even if the book you picked up is a classic or a recommendation for a trusted source. If you don’t love it, let it go. You can always go back to a great book that you know and love.
One Response
Inspirational and uplifting when you connect with the wisdom that relates to your essential through the book’s energy load living me confident in my mind frame to tackle my daily emotions 👍good sign that you like the book