I had “coffee”¹ with a friend the other day who shared that she reads on paper when she travels and leaves the books in the seatback of the plane when she deplanes, for someone else to discover.

My unspoken reaction was, “Oh, she only reads books once.”

I was going to share that I had done this, but only with reader’s copies that I received at conferences that I read out of some vague sense of duty (“reading what everyone else is reading is good for me”) and then abandoned because they were so dull. (Looking at you, A Girls Guide to Hunting & Fishing. And whatever the Gone Girl-ish book was that season.²) But the moment passed because I was so enthralled by her next story:

She has been discovering her new favorite books through a Little Free Library in her neighborhood. Then she found in one a bookmark with a social media handle. She realized that the person leaving these books (all readers copies) was probably somehow in the business. And reached out to him to thank him for introducing her to these books, and started a conversation in which she discovered that he is new to New York. Now they have a coffee date scheduled for next month – something which impresses me beyond measure. I’ve been know to stop people wearing shirts promoting local bookstores on the street and get into conversations with them, but this is a whole nother level.

Anyhow it got me thinking about people who only read books once. I don’t say that I have read every book in my library multiple times – one must allow time in life for things beyond reading and not every book deserves it – but a lot of them, yes, multiple times.

A handful of books deserve an annual pilgrimage: Laura Ingalls Wilder; Tolkein; McKillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; Rinehart’s The Album; Sayer’s Busman’s Holiday; Thrikell’s Northbridge Abbey; McLeod’s The Withdrawing Room, Asimov’s guides to the old and new testaments, Roughing It.³ All of these are in mass market which makes them easy bedtime reading books, lightweight, holdable in one hand.⁴ And comforting because everything works out well in the end: Laura’s family survives the deprivation of the Long Winter; the hero completes the quest, restoring order to the world; the detective apprehends the murderer; balance is restored.⁵

Other books I’ve read multiple times but not annually. I read The Coming Plague⁶ a dozen times one long weekend: on the plane down to visit my grandfather who was suffering from dementia; several times while staying with him because he refused to speak with me, sometimes launching into long, angry, self-pitying monologues that he didn’t seem to expect me to listen to; on the plane home again. Sometimes I am so moved by a book that I don’t want it to end and, having turned the last page, sigh and return immediately to the first page. Diane Ackerman. William Bridges’⁷ The Way of Transformation, Pema Chodron.

Some books languish on my shelf until I decide it’s time to re-read them: Cartoon History of the Universe; Dirt; Any Four Women Can Rob the Bank of Italy, Road Rules, compendiums of Bloom County and Trudeau. A few reflect times when I was going through a phase: I own two copies of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, one of which is marked up and highlighted extensively; the other pristine, in case I need to share it with a friend, optimistic thought. My copy of Influence is the same way, and my Schein. Crichton’s Travels, which feels now like it fell out of a time capsule; but not as much as The Eight.

And some I have read once and gently place upon the shelf. Maybe I’ll return to them later. You never know when the mood will strike and you’ll feel the need to revisit Pedestrianism or books about conspiracy theories, cryptids, or the history of aspirin or of cholera.⁸

Reading on e- has shifted my re-reading habits. Some books, I’ve read multiple times: Popular Crime, The Man on the Train, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark⁹, Three Bags Full. It’s hard to read multiple times on e- because I have so many e-books and, although I’ve created shelves, they all just get lost in a massive stream of books of I read once that I’ll probably never read again, like the one I just finished, Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching the Killer.¹⁰

My friends and I used to go on reading vacations. We’d rent a big house on the beach and show up with one or two giant Lands-End bags filled with paperbacks, which we’d pile on the big coffee table in the living room. Not long after the sun rose, we’d drift into the living room, we’d grab a book, maybe one of ours, maybe someone else’s, and curl up in a deck chair or window seat, and read. After a few hours, we’d fix breakfast, check the weather, maybe go for a swim or a walk on the beach, read some more. After lunch, we’d venture out to the lighthouse or a used bookstore, or maybe take the ferry to the neighboring island where we’d hit some gift shops and more bookstores. Sometimes, at the end of the week, we’d leave a few books at the house; sometimes we carried more home than we started with.

I miss that.

Now we go to the lake with my husband’s family, which I enjoy. But they are very active and only read at night, if even then. If I want a day, sitting quietly alone, reading, I feel like I am being judged for not being more active, for not spending time with the family. And my husband – decidedly not a reader – likes to do things with me. If I’m not going out and doing something with him, we play cards or a game. Sometimes he allows me to read aloud to him, but his taste in books is not my own, and he tends to fall asleep for chapters at a time and then get lost. Or demand a summary of what he missed. So annoying.

Now, instead of discovering books that friends brought on vacation, I find them online. People recommend books on LinkedIn, business books. I get excited, download samples – a very bad habit – and dip into them. Unless they’re really compelling, I somehow never manage to commit to them.

I stumble across recommendations as I peruse my newsfeed or while listening to a podcast. I find them when I’m browsing a bookstore; or search them out, browsing online. My habit is to download a sample – I have hundreds of orphaned samples in my account. If I like the book, I add it to my wishlist. If I don’t, I delete the sample. When I’m getting ready to travel, I pull the trigger and download 5-7 new books to have with me. And then probably buy more while I’m traveling.

When I buy eBooks, I have to check what page the sample ended on, so I can skip forward to that page when I buy the book. What drives me nuts? A sample so short that you don’t even get out of the introduction before the sample ends. Some samples are surprisingly generous – and those books almost always get purchased.

I may tell myself that I need this book on paper, like Murderland. While it would have been easier to make notes and highlight passages in e-, I knew I’d want to read that one on paper. I should have bought Popular Crime on paper but I read it so regularly while traveling – I’m not going to promise that it’s once per trip, but pretty close – that would have been impractical. My secret worry – not so much of a worry now that B&N is making a recovery – is that nook will be discontinued and I’ll lose my online collection.

And how then would I re-read the books I’ve bought online and read multiple times?

What about you? Do you read books multiple times? If not, what do you do with them after you finish reading? And where are you discovering new favorites?

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1. I don’t think either of us was drinking coffee. But we sat in a coffee house drinking the kind of beverages you can buy at a coffee house, taking up space for an hour and catching up. ↩︎
2. Did some quick googling to try to jog my memory but alas, it’s gone. Possibly Rocket Boys which I did read that fall, and liked, and don’t have in my collection, but I’m pretty sure it was something like Girls Guide. What stands out to me is not the books themselves but the memory of having read them at the airport and on the plane, making the decision not to add them to my collection, and leaving them in the seat pocket. As I scurried down the aisle dragging my carry on, some helpful passenger in the back of the plane called after me, “You’ve forgotten your books!” I called back over my shoulder, not pausing, “Not forgotten; abandoned.” and she made a disapproving sound at me as if every book deserves a home. I hope she collected them. She probably enjoyed them. Or perhaps she was appalled. ↩︎
3. I said a handful, but as I wrote further, I kept coming back to this paragraph to add titles. ↩︎
4. I just had to replace my copy of The Album because it was literally falling apart in my hands. I debated asking my sister to watch for a copy at the annual book fair in her small town where I sometimes snag amazing finds, but that’s not until the spring and I didn’t want to wait that long. Luckily B&N had a copy on the shelf – horrible cheap e-book cover design – but in Trade. And $17.95. When my original copy came into my life, $17.95 was what you paid for a hardcover. An expensive hardcover, perhaps a presidential biography or something. Most hardcovers were $16.95. ↩︎
5. Okay, the Asimov’s don’t fit this pattern. And Roughing It is just fun to read. ↩︎
6. Not a short book. ↩︎
7. Yes, that William Bridges. ↩︎
8. Surprisingly often. The Cholera book doesn’t get read annually but I do read it more often than I thought I would when I bought it. ↩︎
9. Going to stop listing true crime books. I read a lot of true crime books on e-, possibly because I often read e- while traveling. ↩︎
10. Cute but I guessed several of the main plot twists before I got to the end. I think my sister would like it. ↩︎