Sometimes it seems to me that the world is comprised of two types of readers: those who re-read their favorite books and those who don’t.  Typically, children are big fans of re-reading.  My mom assures me that both my brother and I insisted she read The Monster at the End of this Book by Jon Stone over and over and over again.  Luckily, she obliged because research now suggests that reading the same book to children multiple times is highly beneficial.

Initially, I was torn between making this Wednesdays @ West post another in our important series on Banned Books Week, but I realized that there is a lot of overlap between books other people find offensive and seek to limit access to and those that I love and want to enjoy many times over.   I can’t even count how many times my younger self read Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume.  I am also one of those people whose life was changed by Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.  I was officially not a teenager by the time I discovered that book, but Garden’s writing so touched me that I cried at my desk the morning I heard she had passed away.

Other books that I discovered and rediscover as adult that are technically aimed at teens include The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.  These titles also frequently appear on lists of challenged books.

With Harry Potter, I generally re-read books one through seven every summer.  Assigning seasons of the year to specific books is a bit of a reading quirk of mine.  While the summers belong to Harry, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott makes an appearance every Christmas and Anne of Green Gables and the six other books about Anne Shirley by L.M. Montgomery tend to pop up in the spring.  These last two titles attest not only to my enduring love of literature for young people, but to a certain sense of nostalgia for the books that I loved as a child.

There are, of course, wonders of adult literature that I choose to escape into more than once as well.  The Red Tent by Anita Diamant and The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh belong to this set, as does our Big Read title In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez.  Many of Barbara Kingsolver’s books are re-read favorites of mine, including Flight Behavior.  I’m also just about to delve into The Bean Trees yet again.

Sometimes what I wish to reread depends on my mood.  When I did comforting, I will often turn to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer or Joshua by Joseph Girzone.  If I’m starting to feel a bit cynical or uninspired, I will pick up Granny D: You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell by Doris Haddock.

There are many readers out there who don’t re-read.   Some feel there are too many wonderful titles they’ve yet to explore to go back to something they’ve already experienced.  As a person with an ever growing reading list, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view.  Rarer, I think, is the reader who doesn’t re-read because they don’t find books they like enough to read twice (or more).  While I feel deeply sorry for those readers, I’m afraid I can’t relate.

I’ve often thought that psychologists could learn a lot about a person’s psyche from asking them what books they like to re-read.  Not being trained in that particular field, I will leave the speculation of what my re-reading selections say about my mental state to others.  I’d rather spend my time re-visiting Harry, Anne, Jo, Dinah, Victoria and Taylor.