I need the solidity of a whole book because life often doesn't cohere for me, I mean my perception of life, and I need to find some bedrock however temporary. It's like books help me glue the parts of my life together into an acceptable whole.

"I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext."

I try to maintain a balance between having a vision of the world that many readers do not experience for themselves, trying to give them enough grounding in the world we are all familiar with, so they don't feel that they are completely lost in Faerie.

I have a bad habit of starting a book and reading just far enough to make sure I want to read it and look forward to reading and then putting it to one side while I break the ice on a couple more. In that way, when I feel dull and depressed which is too often, I know I have something to read late at night when I do most of it and not that horrid blank feeling of not having anybody to talk to or listen to.

I think so. I was just in a better place. Any time anyone dredges up all that trauma, all those memories, it's difficult to cope unless you have a strong grounding and you're well.

Re-read the greats until absorbed. Number of books read is a vanity metric.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

Most of my reading is rereading.

Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible.

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read?

"No, no. It's not your fault. 'Books, books, I need my books.' Have you re-read those books yet, by the way?"
- Jerry, "Seinfeld"

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.