Rereading

C.S. Lewis observed in - Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories:

“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”

When I was a teacher, there were indeed certain books/plays that I read again and again because I was teaching them. Among those books were To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, several of Shakespeare's plays (Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, MacBeth), Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. 

But outside of teaching, there are only a few works I have read more than one. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia come to mind. Chesterton's Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man are works that I have also reread.

But now that I'm retired, I have more time to read, and I've begun to reread some of the works I read at some time in the past - sometimes as much as 50 years ago. I recently reread The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, and a series of dystopian novels like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. There are a few others I have read in the last year and a half, but right now I'm more focused on some of the great works I would like to reread in the future. Among them are: 

The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

Utopia by St. Thomas More

The Republic by Plato 

The Confessions by St. Augustine

The Divine Comedy by Dante

I'm sure there will be more title that will occur to me. I will mix them in as I also read works i've never read before. I hoep to find among those new books more that I will want to reread.

After all, I don't want to be an "unliterary" man.