Worth noting that Hopkins rereads his scripts because he is acting on them, in both the specific and general sense of "act," and not necessarily for the casual reader's pleasure. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a professional musician plays a piece > 100x before he performs it on stage, or that a translator ends up reading the source material > 100x before she translates it.
I do agree that rereading a book you enjoyed is valuable, but if you're not a professional "actor" on the artwork, or you didn't passionately love the book, I think it's preferable to wait between rereads, longer than would make possible 100 rereads in a human lifetime. You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader.
> You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader
I think this is often the point of reading a book multiple times, other than for sheer enjoyment. Sometimes we read a book and enjoy it, and upon re-reading it discover that there are parts of the book that we really hadn't understood at all.
These layered depths of meaning often characterize great literature, which is why at least a few re-reads of a book can be surprisingly illuminating.
I've read Neuromancer about once a year since my late teens. It only took me about 10 years to realize there's actually some pretty good comedy in there...
I'm almost finished writing my first book, an introductory programming book. I have kept all of the drafts I've printed out as I've gone through the revision process, and the stack of drafts is a couple feet tall now. It's kind of crazy to look at that stack and realize that by the time the book is published, I will have read the book about ten times. Reading it that many times makes me understand some aspects of the book deeply, but it also blinds me to some aspects of the book.
I can't wait to get back to working on projects. Writing about programming has made me clarify my understanding of many subtle aspects of programming, and of Python. I can't wait to apply my deeper understanding to a number of projects. I'm also looking forward to reading other books again, after a year of reading mostly my own writing.
When you're done with the first draft. Take a break, like 2-4 weeks, enough to forget it before you start rewriting. It cures you from the "blindness" and let you see it with fresh eyes
Anecdotally I've had the same experience when I go on long vacations and come back and look at all my code. "OMG What is this? It's clearly not as easy and understandable as I thought. Must rewrite immediately."
As a fiction writer I can say the experience is much the same, though there's the additional thing where you get really, really tired of your own voice. Or at least I do. Does that happen in non-fic?
I don't get tired of my own voice, because much of the text is informational. One of my long-term goals as a technical writer is to include more of my voice in my technical writing. That's the kind of technical book I've enjoyed the most over the years - writing that is clearly informative, but also conveys the author's personal experience with the subject. I hope my book does well enough to justify a second edition, and I'll revise the book to have a little more voice where appropriate.
One of the hardest parts for me is when the deadlines are pressing enough that the revision process feels like work. If I can go totally at my own pace, I just enjoy the entire process. But sometimes I have to push and write even when I'd rather do other things. Even then, though, the process is really satisfying. I want people to know how to program because it gives them some power. Basic competence in programming takes away the sense that what we're doing is "magic", but leaves people with a sense of joy at taking on hard challenges and making something that works.
I might go back to some non-technical writing at some point as well. Writing a 200-page non technical book sounds pretty appealing after working through a 500-page technical book! Might be a nice sense of balance to do both kinds of writing, in the long run.
YMMV, but if I get tired of my own voice I find I'm usually doing something wrong. I re-wrote my first novel (http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...) dozens of times, and likely read it over a hundred, and I could tell what passages needed work by how I reacted to it when re-reading. If it felt stale, if my eyes glazed over, if I wanted to skim ahead to find where something interesting happened, then the reader would likely to do the same.
One my first readers commented that she found the final version of the book vastly more readable than the earliest one she read, precisely because the voice was livelier and more varied. In the earlier draft she found it "sounded" too much like me all the time, and while my natural voice is not totally boring, too much of any one thing gets dull after a while. Readers invest a lot in our writing, and deserve to rewarded for it in as many ways as possible, from the ideas and characters we show them to the pleasure of the words flowing through their brain.
In non-fiction I've not found this to be such a big problem, although I'm looking less for artistic effect there and much more for clarity, although I don't think I've written anything over 100K words in non-fiction (plenty of things in the mid-10K range, though.)
Yeah. I've written a few non-fiction humor books that don't make me laugh but others enjoy. It's similar to how I can't tickle myself. The only way I can enjoy my writing is if I forgot that I wrote it.
nice! I wrote my first book last year and loved the process and results (The Dread Space Pirate Richard on Amazon). now I have two more books underway in my free time. one is a sequel to that, so fiction. but the other is technical on the topic of software performance and scalability. there are similarities and differences between writing fiction and non-fiction/technical, and I like both.
I love books a lot, and I like to think that I like them "deeper" than most people– I reread almost everything I like at least 2-3 times. But yeah, 100 re-reads is something you only do if you're goddamn hell bent on deconstructing it. (I haven't yet found a book I feel that strongly about.) Otherwise you're probably better off reading more books and getting more context.
I've read Catch 22 at least 100 times. For a while it was the only book I owned(well, had in my possession). It's easy to just flip to any chapter and read it as almost a short story. When you're no longer caught up in the plot books seem a lot more enjoyable. It's also nice to never get that feeling at the end of a good book where you miss it.
I just realized that now that it's been a few minutes since I read the article, my take-away was actually "there is a lot of value in re-reading books", rather than "you should read some books literally 100 times". I'm not sure which was supposed to be the take-away, but I think the former makes more sense than the latter! So yeah, re-reading books you like 2-3 times is a great and enjoyable exercise.
Doing it for professional reasons aside, I do get why
reading something (good/deep) for 100x might be very
interesting.
If you repeat the same word lot's of times, it starts to
loose meaning to you after saying it 20x or 30 times.
Then you keep going and it comes back. But it's different.
Maybe like... "a Rose is a Rose is a Rose...".
In literature, repeating things definitely gives it a
different meaning.
And then there are books/texts that are very dense.
Like Wittgenstein's Tractatus.. that one you'll read
a 100x if you want to understand it.
> You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader
Besides, good literatures are of multi layers. One might miss some the deeper layers in the first few reads. There are also some subtle points the authors try to convey. They usually requires multi reads for most readers to get them.
My wife reads some classic novels many times. I think I am a very good reader. But she has much deeper understanding than I have, explaining to me what other meanings a plot conveys, why a sentence is constructed this way rather than another, although they sound the same for normal ears, etc. in literatures both in English and in our native languages. She always finds something new each time she re-read a classic.
My g/f is currently reading a lot of classics for the first time, and talking to her has reminded me of how little I have left of some of them after a decade or two (or three...) A good book is worth coming back to a few times at least, over the course of a long lifetime.
In my opinion, once a year would be the upper limit on rereadability of a work.
I'm a fast reader, not so much in the speed reading sense, but in the sense of a hunter on the Serengeti plains. I don't need to be fast, just determined enough to get the kill. I used to read in every available free moment, and that was before ebooks.
My thing is that I'm the info-sponge. I started reading Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone when I was 16 -- for context, I've wanted to be a writer since I can remember -- and thought it was simple so I put it down and forgot about it.
At 26 I picked up the book again -- a new novel I started skewed itself YA, so YA I started reading -- and remembered it, so was skipping 5 pages at a time until I zeroed in on the page.
The book I've read most for enjoyment is Mort, which I read once when I was almost a teen, once when I was fifteen and again a decade later. I don't know how I could do that many rereads, because a reread to me already has this sense of Deja Vu where it's like a clone of me is sat in the room reading the story to me, as I'm remembering me reading the story and not just reading the story.
It's entirely different from the perspective of a writer. I've reread my own work a dozen times with ease, but only what I'm working on. Going back to old discarded and forgotten works is like visiting my own grave. So I don't know how much value there would be in reading something a hundred times.
I mean it's easy to say for a script, which works out to about a page (250 words) per minute. So a two hour movie is 120 pages, or 30,000 words. I mean even then you'd be looking at an almost two week endeavour at a normal reading pace. Now the bible, you'd be looking at a year long endeavour. About 31 weeks of continuous reading. No sleeping, no eating, just reading, just stupid.
All it produces is the same as being able to recite the lines of a TV show seconds before the actor on screen says it. Your comprehension isn't any better, I still missed jokes in Simpsons episodes I've seen too many times to count, because I lacked the capability to understand better than my maximum present ability.
So if you speed read everything, maybe rereading when your comprehension is low just adds detail like when a video stream improves in quality. However, I read with a near 100% comprehension level so rereading doesn't even feel like diminishing returns, it just feels like meaningless grunt work. If you had a clean floor and then mopped it, what improvement would you get via mopping it again? After that, you won't even see an improvement from the 3rd mopping to the 100th, and I'm sure several times in between you're going to be wondering why there's suds streaks everywhere.
I do agree that rereading a book you enjoyed is valuable, but if you're not a professional "actor" on the artwork, or you didn't passionately love the book, I think it's preferable to wait between rereads, longer than would make possible 100 rereads in a human lifetime. You're a different person than you were 5, 10, 20 years ago, and you'll experience the same book differently as a different reader.