Books

17 Books You Can Read Over And Over And Still Keep Learning New Things

A lot of books have great take-home messages that will get you thinking, but often, once you’ve put that book pack on the shelf, you’re sort of… done. You’ve figured out that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe is actually a religious allegory, and then you’ve moved on. You reread Animal Farm after high school and you totally get it this time, but then you put it back on the shelf and get on with your day.

But sometimes you come across a book that teaches you something brand new every time you pick it up. And that’s pretty special. These 17 books never run out of things to say, whether it’s a new perspective on the meaning of existence, or a cultural commentary that resounds with you slightly differently with each passing year, or just another cool fact about panda bears you didn’t know you needed.

Image: Anne Varak/flickr

by Emma Oulton

'The Little Prince' by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

There’s a reason this novella is so beloved: it teaches us about loneliness, friendship, love, loss, childhood, courage, and human nature… all in 120 pages. The book has the rather magical quality of always seeming directly meaningful to you, no matter what you’re going through in your life when you read it. It’s about to get made into a super-adorable looking film, and I already can’t wait to see what other life lessons we’ll learn from that.

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'S' by Doug Dorst

This is the most multi-layered book I’ve ever read. It’s a novel about a haunted ship, with footnotes telling the story of the author and the woman who loved him, and hand-drawn annotations telling the love story between two literature students, and newspaper cuttings telling the story of a massive conspiracy that may or may not have something to do with the events of the novel itself… Whoa. You could read this book 500 times and still uncover new information.

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'Americanah' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a love story, but one that spans three continents and explores identity, class, and modern attitudes to race. Romances can actually teach us a lot anyway, and the pairing of this love story with strong social commentary teaches us a lot about our world.

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'Moby-Dick' by Herman Melville

Yeah, so, Moby-Dick has a lot to say about good, evil, and religion — but it also has a lot to say about whales. Seriously, every time you read this classic you’ll learn something else about whale hunting, whale lines, and extracting whale oil (yeuch).

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'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse is a novel with very little dialogue, and basically no action at all. What’s left, then, is a series of thoughts and observations that sound a lot like that annoying voice in your head that’s always chatting at you. (Right? Not just me?) When a book is nothing but one long thinking spree, you’re bound to do a lot of your own serious thinking every time you read it.

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'White Teeth' by Zadie Smith

This book has such a lot going on that critics found it really hard to review, unable to condense the multi-layered plot into a few short words. I’m going to have the same problem, so just trust me on this: you’ll learn something new about identity, race, family, and cultural bemusement every time you pick it up.

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'To Kill a Mockingbird' by Harper Lee

The main themes of To Kill a Mockingbird are sexual assault and racism, and they’re pretty massive topics. But that doesn’t stop Harper Lee from fitting in a million other lessons about courage, compassion, gender, and tolerance for readers to discover and rediscover again and again.

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'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' by Mitch Albom

Every time I’ve read this book, I’ve thought it’s saying something different. Is it about religion? Or fate? Or childhood? Is it about life, or about death? The plot follows an elderly theme park worker who dies trying to rescue a small child. In heaven, he meets the five people who had an influence on his life; some of them he knows well, some of them he barely recognizes. Each person teaches him something new about his purpose of Earth, and each reading teaches you something new, as well.

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'It's Kind of a Funny Story' by Ned Vizzini

Set in a mental hospital, It’s Kind of a Funny Story offers an insight into depression, self-harm, anxiety, and suicide. These are topics we have a lot to learn about, and the book’s friendly and relatable tone gives us an understanding of living with mental illness that is hard to achieve. Tragically, the author, Ned Vizzini, committed suicide in 2013, after struggling with depression ever since his 20s.

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'Sketches of Young Gentlemen and Young Couples' by Charles Dickens

You know those caricatures you read in newspaper columns, making fun of a particular stereotype of person? Yeah, this is that — but written by Charles Dickens. Despite being over a century out of date, his stereotypes are still so true to life that each time you pick it up you recognize a new character.

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'Senselessness' by Horacio Castellanos Moya

Horacio Castellanos Moya’s great talent is in writing absurd and hilarious characters into real-life tragic events in history. The result is a stark revelation of the senselessness of tragedy. Senselessness is jam-packed with satire and requires your full attention, and even so, you’re bound to pick up on new things with each rereading.

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'Anne of Green Gables' by L. M. Montgomery

Sometimes it’s our childhood favorites who continue to teach us the most. Anne Shirley is a heroine you’ll never stop learning from; each time you dive back into Green Gables you’ll find another way to to define yourself, to laugh at yourself, and to stick up for yourself.

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'Mr and Mrs Doctor' by Julie Iromuanya

Mr and Mrs Doctor is one of those books that can change your whole worldview. In this tale of a Nigerian immigrant in America, Iromuanya sharply shatters the “American Dream” narrative with her biting humor. Think Death of a Salesman translated across cultures. There’s a lot to be learned about the stories we tell ourselves.

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‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar

This is a YA book that found widespread popularity with adult readers. I read it for the first time as a teenager, and found an adventure story of prisoners, outlaws, and poisonous lizards; years later, on my second reading, I discovered a rumination on the importance of our history in determining our fate. There’s a lot more to this novel than meets the eye, which is saying something, because there’s a rather a lot here in the first place.

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‘Passing’ by Nella Larsen

Passing gets its name from the practice of racial “passing”; the main character’s attempt to “pass” as white drives much of the plot. As you reread it, you may find yourself noticing suggestions that some characters are “passing” as heterosexual; reading it yet again you may start to wonder about our present-day obsession with congratulating transgender people only when they are “passing.” This book’s complex depiction of race, gender, and sexuality will keep you learning something new every time.

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‘Giovanni’s Room’ by James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room portrays such an in-depth dissection of sexuality that there’s no way you’ll pick it all up first time. Written in 1950s Paris, Baldwin’s novel follows an American’s battle to understand his own love and desire for the woman he is marrying and the barman he adores.

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‘Fish That Fake Orgasms’ by Matt Walker

Everyone loves animal facts. Seriously. We had a friend at university who we kept around solely because he knew so many animal facts. Did you know that mice’s hearts glow green every time they beat? That’ll win you some friends at your next pub quiz. Pick up this fun book to learn the important things in life.

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