Manuals for Living

IF I conducted a brutal assessment of my reading habits—something I am not eager to do—the results would show that I spend an alarming percentage of my time rereading the same book: the 1965 novel Stoner by John Williams.

As a reader and part-time book critic, I know I should focus my limited attention on the relentless tide of new and exciting work. But the decision to reread Stoner often feels more like a compulsion.

I’m not alone in this pattern. My wife, the novelist Erin Almond, has probably read Little Women as many times as I’ve read Stoner. A friend, the novelist and critic William Giraldi, revisits Wilkie Collins’s novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White on an annual basis.

I suspect every writer could tell a similar story. We return to our favorite novels for three distinct reasons.

First, for the sheer pleasure of entering into a familiar world, as we did in childhood, when we would delightedly read—or be read—the same story