There are so many books. I think we can probably agree on this. Some of us might feel like there are perhaps too many books, but in the interest of agreement: there are so many. More than four million in the United States last year, to offer just one very large number. Even accepting that only a small(ish) fraction of those are books I want to read, it’s a lot of books.
Sometimes, when the inevitable most-anticipated-books lists come out at the start (and middle) of the year, I make my own little sublists of things I want to read. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. LitHub had hundreds of books on their 2026 list. I couldn’t even read the whole list. I want to read Paige Lewis’ Canon. I want to read Sunyi Dean’s The Girl With a Thousand Faces. I want to read Camonghne Felix’s Let the Poets Govern and Adam Phillips’ The Life You Want. I’m pretending the second half of this year doesn’t exist, for now. I can’t look that far ahead.
Also, there’s so much to reread.
This is a lesson I keep having to re-learn. I struggle with rereading. It’s because of all those new books. It is hard to turn my back on the TBR pile—physical, mental, compiled into a spreadsheet, you name it—and commit time to something I’ve read before. But then I do it, and I wonder what’s wrong with me. Rereading isn’t wasting time; it’s not treading too-worn, muddy ground. It’s finding what I didn’t see before, discovering the details and the threads that were hiding, and, sometimes, if I’m really lucky, finding something I didn’t even know about myself.
When I was a young teen, Jo Clayton was probably one of my top three favorite authors (sharing the podium with Tolkien and Le Guin). She comes up here and there in these columns, but I’ve never got into a lot of depth because it’s been decades since I read any of her books. Once upon a time, though, I read her Duel of Sorcery on repeat. (I had no compunction about rereading as a kid. Time was endless! Books were limited!) I spent hours with the green girl Serroi, the powerful beings trying to use her as a pawn, the women warriors, the surly girls and strong girls and magical politics. I don’t remember what happened in those books, but I remember what reading them felt like. I read other Claytons—the Wild Magic series were probably my second favorites—but it was Moongather, Moonscatter, and Changer’s Moon that I would snap up copies of whenever I found them in used bookstores. It was like I was storing them up, just in case.
Earlier this year, I reread Moongather for a podcast. Have you ever gone back to a place you visited years ago and felt, simultaneously, like you knew the lay of the land but had forgotten every detail? It’s familiar and wildly new at once? Rereading Moongather felt like that. There’s a boat sequence that feels almost Earthsea-like. There are forest spirits with shifting genders that are like something out of a Studio Ghibli film. Everything is far more queer than I understood at twelve, and there’s a freedom about sexuality that was entirely missing in so much of what I read all those years ago. Sometimes it’s weird! Interrupting a getaway to deal with a lord trying to make out with the main character is kind of odd! But love takes a lot of shapes in this book. So does power; so does freedom.
It held up, is what I’m saying. I’m always afraid that those books I loved as a kid won’t hold up in the harsher lights of today. It’s not just content—the casual misogyny, racism, homophobia of some older fantasy—but pacing, character, form, sentences. Rhythms. The norms were different. Maybe I liked Clayton so much because her norms and rhythms made sense to me. But it’s hard to know, looking back, what’s gauzy memory and what’s on the page
Last weekend, I reread The Vampire Lestat. If you had asked me, two weeks ago, what happens in this book, I would have said, “Uh … Lestat becomes a rock star?” It’s been decades. The adaptation—Interview with the Vampire turned The Vampire Lestat for the upcoming third season—has been leaning hard on the rock god aspect. So, naturally, that’s what I thought I remembered.
This is where you get to laugh at me if you’ve read Lestat more recently. It is not that. Maybe 30 to 40 pages of the entire 500 page book are Lestat’s rock adventures: a few pages in the beginning, 30 at the very end. It is very rich territory, ready to be expanded from Lestat’s offhand synopsis, in which making a record and writing an autobiography and planning an epic promotional campaign takes mere pages.
But the book is mostly the autobiography. Lestat’s version of things, from the 1700s up to a very brief version of the events of Interview with the Vampire. In Lestat’s mind, he’s the good guy. Literally: upon becoming a vampire, he tries to be a good man. He determines for himself that he doesn’t need God, that goodness can be found in the secular, that beauty matters more. He is a big hot mess of a boy, basically, sheltered and under-educated, who drags himself into the world once he’s a vampire. He’s a theater kid! It is all wonderful. It is not at all what I remembered. Sure, it’s long; sure, it’s overwrought and florid; sure, Lestat spends a lot of time convincing himself and us that he’s doing his best.
No wonder I loved these books so much as a teen. It wasn’t (just) sexy vampires having epic adventures and becoming rock stars; it was deathless drama queens arguing about the nature of evil, rejecting religion, chasing each other around to have impassioned arguments about what it meant to live a good undead life. The only surprising thing is that I stopped reading the Vampire Chronicles after The Tale of the Body Thief. I think maybe it’s time to go back.
Not all books hold up to rereading, to re-discovery at different times in a reader’s life. Not all books hold surprises about the things that have always mattered to us. Serroi’s willfulness, her resistance to control, her love of animals, her self-loathing over her mistakes; Lestat’s questions, his messy, sometimes disastrous manner of figuring his shit out—those things got into my blood. Or they were already there. Rereading, like I said last time I had this repeated rereading revelation, is time travel: going back not just to what you read years ago, but who you were then. But you take yourself with you, right? The image becomes mirrored: Who you were and what you took from a book the first time is reflected in who you are and what you take from the book now.
This all makes me want to work out a formula, a perfect ratio of new books to rereads. I’m pretty certain that doesn’t exist. But I’m also certain that if I could make the time for more of this—for following references down rabbit holes, for picking up old beloved books when new books remind me of them—then maybe I could keep remembering this instead of having to learn it again and again. In the best books, there is always something new to find, and something older that I might have forgotten.
