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2015集中练：重读旧书是基于内疚的快感? With so many books and so little time, re-reading seems an indulgence. So why is it so popular? Hephzibah Anderson reveals why we do itand why its such a joy. How many times have you read your favourite book? As parents learn with frustration, as small children we love immersing ourselves in the same story over and over. But in adulthood that joy tends to become a forgotten pleasure. We have so little time to read and there are so many great books that weve yet to get around to . You could read a book a day for the rest of your life and still not make it through even a quarter of the titles published in 2013 in the UK alone. With the shelves thus groaning, pulling down a well-thumbed favourite feels an unconscionable indulgence. Yet if my admittedly unscientific research on Facebook is anything to go by, furtive re-readers are everywhere in our midst. For certain fans, re-reading The Lord of the Rings is an annual ritual. Devotees of The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice and Tess of the DUrbervilles also return regularly to the book they prize above all others. One friend told me that Jane Austens Emma can still surprise him, despite his having reading it over 50 times. Now, two new bibliomemoirs have arrived to showcase the insightsboth literary and personalthat are to be gained from that ultimate guilty pleasure: re-reading. Journalist Rebecca Mead, a long-time Englishwoman in New York, first encountered George Eliots Middlemarch at 17. Since then, she has read it again every five years. With each re-reading, it has opened up further; in each chapter of her lifeas she itched to leave home, as she moved to America, had love affairs and become a motherit has resonated differently. | 
