In my opinion, once a year would be the upper limit on rereadability of a work.
I'm a fast reader, not so much in the speed reading sense, but in the sense of a hunter on the Serengeti plains. I don't need to be fast, just determined enough to get the kill. I used to read in every available free moment, and that was before ebooks.
My thing is that I'm the info-sponge. I started reading Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone when I was 16 -- for context, I've wanted to be a writer since I can remember -- and thought it was simple so I put it down and forgot about it.
At 26 I picked up the book again -- a new novel I started skewed itself YA, so YA I started reading -- and remembered it, so was skipping 5 pages at a time until I zeroed in on the page.
The book I've read most for enjoyment is Mort, which I read once when I was almost a teen, once when I was fifteen and again a decade later. I don't know how I could do that many rereads, because a reread to me already has this sense of Deja Vu where it's like a clone of me is sat in the room reading the story to me, as I'm remembering me reading the story and not just reading the story.
It's entirely different from the perspective of a writer. I've reread my own work a dozen times with ease, but only what I'm working on. Going back to old discarded and forgotten works is like visiting my own grave. So I don't know how much value there would be in reading something a hundred times.
I mean it's easy to say for a script, which works out to about a page (250 words) per minute. So a two hour movie is 120 pages, or 30,000 words. I mean even then you'd be looking at an almost two week endeavour at a normal reading pace. Now the bible, you'd be looking at a year long endeavour. About 31 weeks of continuous reading. No sleeping, no eating, just reading, just stupid.
All it produces is the same as being able to recite the lines of a TV show seconds before the actor on screen says it. Your comprehension isn't any better, I still missed jokes in Simpsons episodes I've seen too many times to count, because I lacked the capability to understand better than my maximum present ability.
So if you speed read everything, maybe rereading when your comprehension is low just adds detail like when a video stream improves in quality. However, I read with a near 100% comprehension level so rereading doesn't even feel like diminishing returns, it just feels like meaningless grunt work. If you had a clean floor and then mopped it, what improvement would you get via mopping it again? After that, you won't even see an improvement from the 3rd mopping to the 100th, and I'm sure several times in between you're going to be wondering why there's suds streaks everywhere.
I'm a fast reader, not so much in the speed reading sense, but in the sense of a hunter on the Serengeti plains. I don't need to be fast, just determined enough to get the kill. I used to read in every available free moment, and that was before ebooks.
My thing is that I'm the info-sponge. I started reading Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone when I was 16 -- for context, I've wanted to be a writer since I can remember -- and thought it was simple so I put it down and forgot about it.
At 26 I picked up the book again -- a new novel I started skewed itself YA, so YA I started reading -- and remembered it, so was skipping 5 pages at a time until I zeroed in on the page.
The book I've read most for enjoyment is Mort, which I read once when I was almost a teen, once when I was fifteen and again a decade later. I don't know how I could do that many rereads, because a reread to me already has this sense of Deja Vu where it's like a clone of me is sat in the room reading the story to me, as I'm remembering me reading the story and not just reading the story.
It's entirely different from the perspective of a writer. I've reread my own work a dozen times with ease, but only what I'm working on. Going back to old discarded and forgotten works is like visiting my own grave. So I don't know how much value there would be in reading something a hundred times.
I mean it's easy to say for a script, which works out to about a page (250 words) per minute. So a two hour movie is 120 pages, or 30,000 words. I mean even then you'd be looking at an almost two week endeavour at a normal reading pace. Now the bible, you'd be looking at a year long endeavour. About 31 weeks of continuous reading. No sleeping, no eating, just reading, just stupid.
All it produces is the same as being able to recite the lines of a TV show seconds before the actor on screen says it. Your comprehension isn't any better, I still missed jokes in Simpsons episodes I've seen too many times to count, because I lacked the capability to understand better than my maximum present ability.
So if you speed read everything, maybe rereading when your comprehension is low just adds detail like when a video stream improves in quality. However, I read with a near 100% comprehension level so rereading doesn't even feel like diminishing returns, it just feels like meaningless grunt work. If you had a clean floor and then mopped it, what improvement would you get via mopping it again? After that, you won't even see an improvement from the 3rd mopping to the 100th, and I'm sure several times in between you're going to be wondering why there's suds streaks everywhere.