Reading notes: Books and bed

Literary remedies for sleeplessness, and the luxury of getting horizontal with a novel

When it comes to ‘favourite’ books, I have so many. They qualify as favourites mostly because I enjoyed reading them so much, and have read them again and again over the years.

More recent acquisitions are easy to identify as future star reads - the ones you’d rescue in the event of a fire. The ones that don’t - mostly paperback fiction - are donated to charity shops or the Little Free Libraries dotted around the locality.

I recently (Instagram) read a particularly scathing dismissal of both the term and the concept of ‘re-reading’. I don’t really understand the former. After all, it’s simply describing the act of revisiting a book you’ve already read. Nothing pretentious or cringe-inducing about it. But I’m not sure why anyone would take issue with my enjoying a particular book so much I want to re-immerse myself in it again (and again), perhaps notice new details and meanings.