I recently found my eleven year old son on his bed after his exhausting day of painting and yard work.

“What are you up to?” I asked.

“Reading.”

Surprised, because reading is not usually his choice for relaxing, I curiously asked, “What book?”

“The Kid Who Only Hit Homers.”

Just in time I restrained myself from commenting. He’s read it before–many, many times. For some reason, perhaps because it is the first chapter book he read independently a couple of years ago, he’s
fond of that one. Undoubtedly he will grow to have other favorites, but I have a hunch that Matt Christopher will be tucked into his box of boyhood treasures and accompany him when he leaves home someday.

I had to chuckle at myself a bit when I was writing down the titles of a few books I’ve finished lately. Looking back over the list, I had put a star next to those I had read before. There were a fair number of them.

This is why I began pondering about the reasons we reread books. Sometimes, like my son, I reread books just because they are like revisiting close friends. It is also always delightful to find details in them I had missed. Especially when reading aloud to my children books I’ve read long ago, I am amazed at how differently I understand them than I did the first time. Often I find even more pleasure in them than I did back then, similar to hearing an old song you once loved and feeling the memories and emotions associated with them that flood back. When I reread books my book club members are reading for the first time, I feel like you do when two friends you know finally get to meet each other.

At the CMI conference last spring, Jerram Barrs mentioned books he rereads every year: all of Jane Austen, The Lord of the Rings, the Narnia Chronicles–to name a few. At the time, I thought this a fine example of classics, the books worth reading again and again because they never cease to feed us and inspire us. Some books, after all, enter into us and take up permanent residence, touch our emotions, affect our thinking, alter our decisions, change our outlook on the world and the people in it. They indelibly mark our memories and we cannot imagine having lived without their thoughts.

Some books have helped me to grow up, led me a little further up and further in, while others I have had to grow up in order to appreciate, merely shaking hands and glimpsing at a first reading a trickle of the rivers of knowledge and beauty they contain.

Then I realized that this is yet again an answer to the question I am asked at least weekly: What is a living book?

It is a book you are glad you read, but even more, want to read again–and again. Living books are those that teach and which you instinctively know will teach you again, that bring a satisfying pleasure you cannot resist repeating. Books take possession of you and you then own them inside you forever. It’s no wonder I’ve reread so many every year, and am not only unapologetic for doing so, but am deeply grateful to have the privilege of rereading them.

What are the books you return to again and again? Here are some of mine I have reread since January:

Parents and Children by Charlotte Mason
School Education by Charlotte Mason
Ourselves by Charlotte Mason
On the Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason
Toward a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason
Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn Chandler McIntyre
The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare
Gettysburg by MacKinlay Kantor
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White
The Pony Express by Samuel Adams
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien
Cheaper by the Dozen by Frank Gilbreth, Jr. and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
Rip Van Winkle and Other Stories by Washington Irving
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers

For the joy of reading,

Liz