Weird reading habits

As I’m sitting here forcing myself to finish Ready Player Two, I’m already thinking of what to read next to clear my palette of this book. I don’t like to be negative about people’s work, and I can appreciate how much of a challenge it must be to write a follow up to such an original and popular book, but I am keen to get onto the next story.

I use Apple Books for most of my reading at the moment, and I like the feature it has to add books to your Want to read section. I’ve got quite an interesting mix of genres to read next including Recursion by Blake Crouch and I’m considering starting the Stormlight Archive. As I’ve been browsing through these books, however, my mind keeps wandering back to the best book series I’ve ever read, namely Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower series and I lamented about how I wish I could read this again for the first time. It then struck me that I’d never read a book more than once.

I can watch films, even bad ones, over and over again, but to do so with a book seems completely alien to me. I’ve seen Bad Boys 2 about 50 times, yet read some true works of art just once. That struck me as a bit of a weird distinction across mediums.

I started this post just as a very quick micro post on micro.blog, but as I started writing I wanted to explore a little bit about why I felt like this about books, but I’m completely at a loss for why it is. The only semi-answer I can think of is that reading a book is somewhat more of an investment than sticking a film on. While I’ve always been a strong reader, even as a child, I very rarely carve out enough me time to really chew through a book in an afternoon like many, more focused people do. For me I read in drips and drabs, mainly at night. I usually get into bed about midnight at which point I only read about a page and then pass out so reading a book for me can often take weeks. I’m making more of a concerted effort to read for the rest of the year, so hopefully this can improve.

Long story short, I’m interested in whether or not this hang up on re-reading books is a me thing, or if anyone else experiences this. If you’re a normal person, do you have a go to / happy place book that you read over and over again?