Every year around December, our editorial team does an informal round-robin where each of us names the book we re-read that year. Not a new release. Not something we read for work. The book we returned to because we wanted to, because something in our year made us reach for it again. The choices say a lot about who we are and what we needed.

Re-reading is an underappreciated practice. We live in a culture obsessed with the new, with reading lists and TBR piles and the anxiety of falling behind on the latest releases. But there’s a different kind of value in going back. A book you’ve already read can surprise you. You’ve changed since the last time, and the book meets that changed version of you in unexpected places. Sentences that meant nothing at twenty-five suddenly hit hard at forty. Plot points that once felt slow now feel exactly right.

Here are the books our editors re-read this year, and why.

Sarah’s Pick: “Stoner” by John Williams

Sarah, our managing editor, picks this book almost every other year. I used to tease her about it. I don’t anymore, because she finally convinced me to read it, and now I understand.

“Stoner” is a novel about a quiet man who becomes a college English professor in Missouri. That’s it. That’s the whole plot. William Stoner grows up on a farm, discovers literature in college, becomes a teacher, has a difficult marriage, raises a daughter, has an affair, has a feud with a colleague, and dies. Nothing dramatic happens. There are no twists, no revelations, no moments of cinematic action.

And yet every time Sarah re-reads it, she cries. “It’s the most honest book about what it means to have a life,” she told me once. “Not a remarkable life. Just a life. The way most of us actually live.” She’s right. Williams writes about the accumulation of ordinary days with such precision and compassion that by the end, Stoner’s unremarkable existence feels as weighty and significant as any epic. The novel asks whether a quiet life, dedicated to work and learning and small moments of beauty, is enough. The answer it gives is complicated and deeply moving.

Sarah says she re-reads it when she needs to be reminded that paying attention to small things matters. As an editor who spends her days caring about commas and paragraph breaks and the exact right word in a sentence, I think she finds validation in Stoner’s quiet devotion to his work. Find it on Amazon.

Marcus’s Pick: “The Master and Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov

Marcus handles our non-fiction line, which makes his fiction pick interesting. Bulgakov’s wild, satirical novel about the Devil visiting Soviet Moscow is about as far from non-fiction as you can get. The book is chaotic in the best way, jumping between a retelling of Pontius Pilate’s encounter with Christ and the havoc the Devil and his entourage (including a giant cat who rides the Moscow tram system) wreak on Moscow’s literary establishment.

“I re-read it because nothing else feels like it,” Marcus said. “Every time I think I’ve figured out what the book is doing, it does something else. It’s funny and terrifying and sad all at the same time, sometimes in the same paragraph.” He’s on his sixth or seventh read-through and says he still finds passages he doesn’t remember, still catches references he missed before.

I think Marcus also responds to the book’s history. Bulgakov wrote it knowing it would never be published in his lifetime. He wrote it for the drawer, as the Russian expression goes. There’s something about the freedom of writing without any expectation of publication that comes through in the text. It’s unruly and personal and entirely itself. For someone who works in an industry where commercial considerations shape everything, that kind of pure artistic expression must be refreshing. Find it on Amazon.

Priya’s Pick: “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Priya edits our literary fiction, and her pick this year was “Beloved.” She’s read it at least ten times, she says, and she never approaches it casually. “I have to clear space for it,” she told me. “I can’t read it on the subway or in bits and pieces. I need a weekend where I can sit with it.”

Morrison’s novel about Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her dead daughter, is one of those books that operates on every level simultaneously. It works as a ghost story, as historical fiction, as a psychological portrait, as an act of witness. The language is dense and musical and demanding. Morrison does not make it easy for you. She expects you to work, to sit with confusion, to let images accumulate meaning over pages and chapters.

Priya says that what changes each time she reads it is what she notices about the secondary characters. “The first time, you’re so consumed by Sethe’s story that everyone else blurs. But Paul D, Denver, Baby Suggs, they’re all carrying their own impossible weight. Each re-read, I spend more time with someone different.” This year, she said, she was struck by Baby Suggs’s sermon in the Clearing, the passage about loving your own flesh. She said it made her put the book down and sit in silence for a long time.

I asked Priya if she thought “Beloved” influenced her editorial work. She laughed. “Everything I edit, I’m measuring against Morrison, at least a little bit. It’s not fair to the authors. But it keeps my standards where they should be.” Find it on Amazon.

James’s Pick: “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

James is our production manager, and his pick always leans toward comedy. This year it was Toole’s posthumously published novel about Ignatius J. Reilly, one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Ignatius is a slothful, pompous, medieval-minded man living with his mother in New Orleans, railing against modernity while eating hot dogs and writing a barely comprehensible philosophical treatise on Big Chief tablets.

“I re-read it because it makes me laugh out loud on every page,” James said. “Actual, physical laughter. How many books do that?” He has a point. Genuine comedy is rare in literary fiction. Plenty of novels are “wry” or “witty” in a restrained, smile-inducing way. Very few are actually funny in the way that a great standup set is funny, where you find yourself making involuntary sounds of amusement. “A Confederacy of Dunces” is that kind of funny.

But James also appreciates the book’s sadness. Toole killed himself before it was published. His mother spent years trying to get it into print, eventually persuading the novelist Walker Percy to read it. The gap between the book’s exuberant comedy and its author’s despair gives it an extra dimension. “You can’t separate the book from that story,” James said. “The funniest book I’ve ever read was written by a man in profound pain. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but it means something.”

It’s worth noting that James’s taste for comedic writing has influenced our publishing program. He’s always advocating for books that are genuinely funny, arguing (correctly, I think) that the market underestimates how much readers want to laugh. Find it on Amazon.

My Pick: “The Remains of the Day” by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’m the one writing this, so I get to talk about my own pick last. This year I went back to Ishiguro’s novel about Stevens, an English butler taking a road trip through the countryside while reflecting on his years of service at Darlington Hall.

I first read this book in college, and I remember being bored by it. A butler driving through England and thinking about silver polishing? I was twenty-one and wanted books that felt urgent and dramatic. I picked it up again in my thirties and it destroyed me. Stevens is a man who has sacrificed his entire emotional life in service to a concept of dignity and professionalism that may have been mistaken all along. He missed his chance at love. He served a master whose political activities were, it becomes clear, deeply misguided. And he cannot quite bring himself to admit any of this, even to himself.

What gets me every time is the gap between what Stevens says and what he means. Ishiguro writes the most devastating novel about regret and wasted life, and he does it through a narrator who will not, cannot, say directly what he feels. You have to read between every line. The restraint is what makes it so powerful. When Stevens finally breaks down at the end, on a bench by the sea at the end of the pier in Weymouth, the emotion is overwhelming precisely because it’s been held back for so long.

I re-read it this year because I was thinking about work-life balance, about how much of myself I put into this publishing house, about whether the sacrifices are worth it. Stevens is an extreme case, but his fundamental question, “Did I spend my life well?”, is universal. I don’t think the book answers the question. I think it makes you sit with it, which is more valuable than any answer.

When I finished it this time, I called my mother. She seemed surprised to hear from me on a Wednesday evening. I didn’t explain why I was calling. I just wanted to talk. Find it on Amazon.

Why Re-Reading Matters for What We Publish

These picks aren’t just personal indulgences. They shape our editorial sensibility. When Sarah re-reads “Stoner” and is moved by its commitment to the ordinary, she brings that appreciation to the manuscripts she evaluates. When Priya measures everything against Morrison, she’s maintaining a standard of linguistic ambition that filters into our literary fiction program. When Marcus is refreshed by Bulgakov’s anarchic creativity, he’s more likely to champion bold, unconventional proposals.

The books we re-read are, in a way, the foundation of the books we publish. They’re our touchstones, the works we return to when we need to remember why we got into this business in the first place. Publishing can be exhausting and discouraging. Sales figures disappoint. Books you believed in don’t find their audience. The market rewards things you find mediocre while ignoring things you find brilliant. In those moments, going back to a book you love is like recharging a battery.

I see this reflected in our own catalog. The Last Archive by Catherine Voss has that same quality of careful, accumulated detail that makes “Stoner” so effective. Still Waters by Elena Marsh shares some of Morrison’s willingness to let language do complex, multilayered work. Echoes of Iron by James Whitfield has the historical sweep and emotional specificity that the best re-readable novels share. These connections aren’t always conscious, but they’re real.

The Case for Going Back

I want to make a broader argument for re-reading, beyond its influence on our editorial work. We live in an era of infinite content. There are more books published every year than any person could read in a lifetime. The pressure to keep up, to stay current, to have an opinion on the latest releases, can be relentless.

But there’s diminishing returns to always reading the new. Some of the new books you read this year, you’ll barely remember next year. They’ll blur together into a vague impression of “I read a lot this year.” The books you re-read, though, deepen. They become part of your mental furniture. You know them in a way you can never know a book you’ve read only once.

Vladimir Nabokov, who was famously opinionated about reading, once said that you can’t really read a book, only re-read it. His argument was that the first time through, you’re too busy following the plot, processing the basic mechanics of what’s happening, to really appreciate how the book works. Only on a second (or third, or fourth) reading do you start to see the architecture, the patterns, the quiet brilliance of specific sentences and structural choices.

I think he was overstating the case (Nabokov overstated most cases), but there’s truth in it. My experience of “The Remains of the Day” on second reading was so radically different from my first that they might as well have been different books. The first time, I read the surface. The second time, I read the depths. Both experiences were valid, but the second one was richer in ways the first couldn’t have prepared me for.

If you haven’t re-read a book in a while, I’d encourage you to try it. Pick something you loved years ago and go back. You might be disappointed; some books don’t hold up, and that’s useful information too. But you might also find that the book has grown, or rather, that you have, and the book was waiting for you to catch up.

What We’re Re-Reading Next Year

We’ve already started making predictions about next year’s picks, though of course the whole point is that you can’t plan these things. The book you need to re-read finds you, usually at the right moment.

Sarah says she might finally go back to “Middlemarch,” which she hasn’t touched since graduate school. Marcus is threatening to re-read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in the original Spanish, which would be ambitious given that his Spanish is, by his own admission, “functional at best.” Priya is considering “Song of Solomon,” another Morrison, because she says she’s been circling back to Morrison’s earlier work lately. James won’t commit to anything, which is very on-brand for James.

As for me, I’ve been eyeing my copy of “The Great Gatsby.” I read it in high school, like everyone, and dismissed it as a book about rich people behaving badly. I suspect I’d read it very differently now. The way Fitzgerald writes about longing and loss and the distance between who we are and who we want to be, I think I’m ready for that in a way I wasn’t at seventeen.

Whatever we choose, the practice itself is what matters. Taking time to go back, to let a familiar book speak to your current self, to resist the tyranny of the new. That’s a reading habit worth cultivating. It reminds us that the best books aren’t consumed and discarded. They’re companions. They travel with us, and they change as we change, and they’re always there when we need them.

We’d love to hear what you re-read this year. Drop us a line, or tell us on social media. The conversations about old favorites are always the best ones.

Published by the ScrollWorks Media editorial team.