Should You Read the Same Book Twice?

“Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?”

During my Thinkspot days, the commentator Heather Mac Donald and I recorded a discussion that, though primarily focused on our shared frustrations with our alma mater and its recent political upheavals, soon morphed into a conversation about education more broadly. We discussed the purpose of education, and I presented, at one point, an idea voiced by George F. Will in his 2019 book The Conservative Sensibility. Channeling Woodrow Wilson favorably for once, Will described Wilson’s view that education properly practiced served as “a way of making young people artificially ‘old’ by steeping them in seasoned ideas.” (1) Mac Donald, in turn, emphasized the importance of engaging with the essential texts of what is often collectively referred to as “the Western Canon.” Amid this exchange about the importance of recentering the essential literature of our history, I posed to Mac Donald a question that has been on my mind since my days as a student at The Haverford School: Should one make a habit of reading the same book twice?

I related to Mac Donald—in that April, 2020 conversation—that one of our former teachers W. Stewart Alford, affectionately known among some of his Haverford students as “the great one,” had told us that a man should read Miguel de Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote every 20 years because he would draw something different from it at each stage in life. And he felt this was also true of a number of other works of literature. To that, Mac Donald made the rather compelling case that as much as she wanted to be sympathetic to that view, the sheer number of books (not to mention essays, films, and the like) that exists makes it difficult to assert that one would be better served using his limited time to reread a book. This is all the more the case when, in Mac Donald’s view, one can typically remember much of the works he has already read, particularly key themes and passages. Ruit hora, as they say, and with our limited time, we should explore new works.

On an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience in June of 2019, the investor, podcaster, and author Naval Ravikant, who is also known to advocate jumping around in one’s reading and that, as George Costanza would say “finishing an entire book doesn’t prove anything,” took a different position to Mac Donald’s: “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books because your brain has finite information, finite space.” (Although the available research may not yet be able to respond conclusively to Ravikant’s suggestion that the limits of memory preclude one from being able to recall all that he has read, Douglas Smith, Director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, has suggested that “the brain’s memory storage capacity [is] something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes),” the equivalent of being able “to hold three million hours of TV shows.”)