Opening with Harold Bloom's incantation "Reread Shakespeare. Reread Shakespeare. I always reread Shakespeare", the novelist David Bowman gambols through the various rereading pleasures of, mainly, American authors in the New York Times, ending with Roland Barthes' aperçu that while rereading can bring pleasure, "jouissance" – bliss or orgasm – "may come only with the absolutely new". How French.
This prompted Broger, a contributor to our tips, links and suggestions column, to wonder what the British like to reread, adding that he returns to Dickens at Christmas to "establish a mood to counter the commercialism of our culture at that season".
Our long-running re-readings series has featured many writers from outside the US, including Julian Barnes on Voltaire's Candide, William Boyd on Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
But for readerly passion, look to our seasonal rereading pilgrimages, which have just started up again with Winter reads.
It seems that winter brings out our inner child. Fourteen of the 25 books featured so far in Winter reads and in last year's Season's readings were for children, while all but three of the 25 summer reads were for adults.
But why we do we become so attached to particular books? Perhaps it is not just because of the quality of the books themselves, but also because of the memories they evoke in us. I will always love Jane Eyre for the escape it gave me as an awkward 14-year-old stuck in Paris with an elderly aunt who was supposed to be teaching me French but who retired to bed for much of every afternoon. It comes with an intense sense memory – if not quite the the sort of pleasure that Barthes was talking about.
The author of a new book on rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks, goes further, in a chapter about her second encounters with childhood favourites, saying that "Rereading children's books, for me, has meant above all rereading my younger self".
Spacks cites a a Costa prize survey from 2007 in which – surprise, surprise – the most reread books, for either adults or children, turned out to be the Harry Potter series.
In the post-Potter era, one of the boy wizard's main fan bases is women in their mid-20s. That's a whole heap of twentysomethings rereading their younger selves.
