National Reading Month: The Books I Have Read Forty Times

A Whole Month for Reading

National Reading Month is March, and it has a clear starting gun. On March 2, the birthday of Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, the National Education Association runs Read Across America Day. The NEA launched it in 1998 to get children excited about reading, and March 2 was chosen because Dr. Seuss, author of more than sixty books, made reading fun for generations of kids. That day kicks off a full month dedicated to books, authors, and readers.

The mission behind it is simple and worth repeating. The NEA wanted kids to see reading as fun and adventure, not as a chore. That is the entire game. People who learn early that reading is a pleasure become lifelong readers. People who learn it is homework put books down the second they are allowed to. As someone who has made a living with words, I will tell you the lifelong readers are the ones who end up writing anything worth reading.

A Writer Who Reads Everything

I read constantly, across everything, fiction and history and science and nonsense. But National Reading Month is about the joy of reading, so I want to be honest about what actually brings me joy, and it is not what a writer is supposed to say.

My favorite books are not the prize winners. They are my comfort reads, the ones I return to again and again, the ones I load onto my phone and carry into every doctor’s office and airport and waiting room. I have read some of these books twenty, thirty, even forty times. I own them in audiobook and Kindle and paperback and even hardcover, the same stories in every format, because I never want to be without them. That is not a guilty admission. That is what reading for pleasure actually looks like.

The Books I Keep Coming Back To

Let me name them, because comfort reads are personal and these are mine.

At the top is everything by Mike Resnick. His novels are action adventure with a western feel set out among the stars, lonely heroes and shootouts and faithless companions, all of it transplanted to the far future. They are pure fun. They are not trying to win awards, though his book Santiago might deserve one, and that is exactly why I love them. They relax me. They make me calm. They are the books I travel with, every time.

Then there is Larry Niven’s Known Space series, the Ringworld books and everything around them. This is space opera grounded hard in the science of its time, real physics, real consequences, alien species like the Kzin that are genuinely fascinating to think about. Ringworld itself is a masterpiece. The sequels never matched it, but the original is one of the great science fiction novels, and I keep it on my phone always.

Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber is another I fall back to, and I will go further on this one. The whole series is excellent, front to back, ten out of ten. Most long series sag somewhere in the middle. Amber does not. From the first book to the last it holds, a story about a royal family who can walk between worlds, full of intrigue and betrayal and impossible places, and it rewards every reread.

The first few of Piers Anthony’s Xanth books belong here too. The early ones are clever and funny and a real pleasure. The series goes on far too long and gets tiring after a while, but those first three or four are comfort food.

Even the Heavy Books Get Reread

Two nonfiction books make my reread pile, which surprises people, because they are not light. The taste goes back a long way. The first adult book I ever read, at seven years old, was a history of the battle of Iwo Jima, and I went on to read more than twenty books about that one battle. History has been an obsession my whole life, so it makes sense that two of the books I return to most are heavy works of it.

One is A World at Arms, Gerhard Weinberg’s enormous global history of World War Two. What makes it special is that it is not really about the battles. It is about everything behind the battles, the politics, the demographics, the geography, the food and materials and supply. It explains why things happened. Why Hitler felt the need to attack Russia. Why one decision led to another across the whole world. It is a huge book and a long commitment, and I have read it several times anyway, because understanding the why behind events is endlessly fascinating.

The other is Shattered Sword, by Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully, the story of the Battle of Midway told largely from the Japanese side, built on Japanese primary sources. What grabbed me is how it shows the Japanese were almost predestined to lose, not by luck but by doctrine. American pilots were trained to land on any carrier, while Japanese pilots generally returned to their own. American crews were broadly trained in things like damage control, while the Japanese concentrated that knowledge in a few specialists. Dozens of small structural differences stacked up into defeat. Reading a famous battle from the losing side, and understanding why it had to go that way, is a fascinating thing.

Why Rereading Matters, Especially for Writers

There is a snobbery that says rereading is a waste, that you should always be reading something new. I reject that completely, and so should any writer.

When you read a book for the first time, you are following the plot, racing to find out what happens. You miss almost everything else. The second time, and the fifth, and the fortieth, you stop worrying about what happens and start seeing how it was built. You notice the setup that pays off two hundred pages later. You see how the author controls pace, plants information, builds a character with three small touches. The first read is for the story. Every read after that is a free seminar in craft, taught by a writer good enough that you came back.

That is why I tell every writer to reread their favorites with a cold eye. Stop enjoying it for a minute and ask why it works. Why does this scene land? Why do you trust this narrator? Why have you read this exact book forty times when you have never reread a hundred others? The answer to that question is a lesson you can put straight into your own work.

And beyond the craft, there is the plain human truth of it. A comfort read is a friend. After a hard day, a familiar book asks nothing of you and gives you everything you came for. There is no shame in that. So this March, for National Reading Month, read something new if you like. But do not let anyone tell you that returning to a book you love is a lesser kind of reading. Sometimes the fortieth time through is the best one.

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