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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Re-reading is good.

I have a friend who is against rereading. She is a full-time consumer of content...books, movies, TV shows. She neither rereads nor rewatches, except for rewatching the occasional movie. Once she consumes something, she relegates it to a kind of "been there, done that" part of her brain where many things she consumes get lost.

I've never explored this deeply with her, and I'm not sure whether her attitude is one of "gotta catch 'em all", a continual requirement for novelty, or if she simply never, ever considers anything worth reading/watching again (with a few exceptions). She simply doesn't understand why I occasionally want to watch or read something I enjoyed hugely in the past, or don't think I got quite enough out of the first time. To her, my habits are a waste of time.

I read your comment and thought, “that’s quite a simplistic thing to say, hardly worth making such a comment.”

But I re-read it and thought, “then again the commenter is saying ‘good’ not ‘great’… perhaps they are admitting to more nuance?”

Interesting concepts, thank you.

I think the article which argues against re-reading doesn't deserve a longer comment.

i think i get your point. on one hand the article doesn't even really deserve the time to write any comment. on the other hand its pretentiousness and attention here opens a dissonance which one seeks to resolve. i mean, why even make a fuss about that at all about reading a book again? i like a book. i might reread it again. someone else begs to differ, shall they seek heaven in their own fashion. i reread a number of books and it was always a pleasure.

Well, Sylvester (see footnote), or Euclid, whatever your name is, I think you get what I’m saying.

Footnote: on rereading your message, the sequence 2,3,7,43,1807 jumped out at me as being “Sylvester’s sequence” — sometimes called Euclid numbers — I definitely did not have to look that up in the online integer sequence database and simply know all these things intuitively.

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