I have read Middlemarch three times. The first time, at nineteen, I read it for the plot, and was annoyed when the plot took its time. The second time, at twenty-eight, I read it for the marriage of Dorothea and Casaubon, which I had not previously understood was the centre of the book. The third time, at thirty-six, I read it for the sentences, which is the only reason left.
Each time the book was different, because I was different. Eliot did not change. The text on the page was the same text. But what I brought to the encounter (the years of disappointment, the slow understanding of what marriages can do, the willingness to sit with an old woman narrator and trust her) that was new every time. The book was a mirror in which I read my own changes.
There is a cult of the new in reading. Goodreads measures you by your year in books. The publishing industry survives on novelty. Both encourage you to read more, faster, never twice. I want to argue here for the opposite practice: read fewer books, more carefully, and re-read the ones that mattered when you change.