I avoid re-reading. My favorite novels, I’ve only read once. After all, I already know what happens. Or rather – I know what I once knew about it, and am reluctant to know it differently. In her 2020 book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader , Vivian Gornick expresses the opposite inclination: a compulsion to return. Where I guard a past reading, she rushes to strip off its layers. ‘It has often been my experience,’ Gornick writes, ‘that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly called into alarming question.’ Re-reading, then, like psychoanalysis, is a lived experience of reinterpretation. You are made suddenly aware of shifts in your identifications, tolerances and interests since the last time you turned these pages. Maybe this time you are more drawn to Vronsky than Levin, or you want to know what the hell happened in Poirot’s childhood.…