Rereading, reading aloud, and keeping a record

Three old fashioned habits that give more back than they cost.

Rereading has an undeserved reputation as a waste of a slot. It is not, because you are not the same reader you were, and the book you return to at forty is measurably not the book you read at twenty. The plot is no longer doing the work, so you notice construction, rhythm, what was withheld, what you completely missed. A first reading tells you what happens. A second tells you how it was done, and that is where most of the pleasure of craft lives. It is also the cheapest reading available, since the thing is already on your shelf.

Reading aloud is treated as something you stop doing when children learn to read for themselves, which is a strange piece of cultural amnesia. It slows you to the pace of the sentences, which is the pace they were written at. It exposes weak writing instantly and makes good writing physically enjoyable. It is also one of the few pleasures two adults can share in the same room without a screen, and one of the better things you can do for someone who is unwell, tired, or losing their sight.

Keeping a record is the smallest of the three and possibly the most useful. Not a review, and not a rating. A line or two: what it was, when you read it, and one honest sentence about what you thought. Within a year you have something no recommendation system can give you, which is an accurate picture of your own taste over time, including the seasons where you read nothing at all. Those blank stretches turn out to be as informative as the entries. You begin to see which parts of the year you read in, what pulls you back after a gap, and which kinds of writing you keep returning to without ever having decided that you liked them.