So many books, so little time! I’m enjoying having more time for reading for pleasure now I’ve finished my MA. It’s sometimes possible to feel guilty about going back to reread books, when I’ve got so many unread books waiting for me.

But you never actually read the same book twice. You never have the same experience of a book twice, because you will have changed. At different times in your life, you bring different experiences and knowledge with you to a book – you’ll pick up on different things, other elements will resonate with you, you’ll spot connections you missed before.

In An Experiment in Criticism, C S Lewis proposed judging books by how their readers read and respond to them, rather than judging the taste of readers against some pre-determined “canon” of quality literature. So rather than good and bad books, or “literary” versus “genre” books, “classic” vs “popular”, he distinguished between “literary” and “unliterary” ways of reading.

You can judge a book on the quality of its readers, Lewis suggests, and the way in which they read the book. If a book is “tossed aside like an old newspaper the moment it has been used, unliterary reading can be diagnosed with certainty”. But, “where there is a passionate and constant love of a book and rereading, then however bad we think the book and however immature or uneducated we think the reader, it cannot”.

A good book invites and rewards rereading. It will also have more on offer than just “how will the plot be resolved?” Plot is the skeleton on which the juicy meat of story hangs. In a good book, you can enjoy the characters, situation, descriptions, atmosphere and so on repeatedly even when you know how the story ends. And a good reader is one who delights in not just in books in general, but loves specific books and returns to them to drink again from their riches.