Does rereading count as reading?

It’s winter and honestly the past month has been absolutely garbage. I started to feel numb to tv shows I was trying to watch, and bored of the short term gratification from my social media.

Thank god this apathy usually hits around a break where I get to see my friends and family otherwise I’d be in full crashout. Right on schedule though, I felt it a week or two ago after an objectively rough period, and decided to read.

I always have a book I’m working on (recently my pick has been Bad Feminist, by Roxanne Gay), but I needed a fast and entertaining read, which I found in An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. This book is special to me for a few reasons. First, I was caught up in the manic pixie dream girl vision presented by the female leads in John Green novels (though the eyes of his dumb male leads). Second, it was a clever book that spoke to my brain- it has real math for predicting the course of a relationship based on variables like relative attractiveness, dumper/dumper status, etc.

When I remembered this book, I lit up. I wanted to see if it thrilled and excited me the way it did when I was 8 years younger. Of course, it’s a smallish book and I’m a fast reader, so I finished it in a day (I get nothing done when I’m into a book).

There were parts of the book that I didn’t remember, and parts I remembered so well that I probably smiled unconsciously because I felt transported to 14 again. Of course I formed new insights and analysis, but overall it was such a fun reread.

I’m not sure that it counts for new reading points, but this post is simply to advocate for the revisiting of nostalgic books! It can be healing to find your younger self in a story, and personally it was exactly what I needed.

xxx