The Case For Rereading Star Wars Books
Rereading Star Wars books may not be a total waste of time.
I reread more Star Wars books than I originally planned to in 2023, and I have zero regrets.
It’s often hard to justify reading a book you’ve already read when there are so many others you haven’t gotten to yet. I love Star Wars books, but I also read a lot of books that aren’t set in a galaxy far, far away. If I’m being honest, the podcast is responsible for most of 2023’s rereads, and if I didn’t have that, I’m not sure if I would have picked as many back up as I did.
It surprised me how beneficial I found most of these rereads, so I wanted to spend some time talking about the good things that can happen when you reread a Star Wars book.
Is rereading Star Wars books a waste of time or worth the effort? It could, potentially, be the best use of your energy and time.
Comfort Reading Counts As Reading
Read that again. Read it one more time.
There’s a lot of pressure in fandom to consume, or have consumed, every piece of available media in the particular franchise(s) you consider yourself a fan of. Many “fans” will tell you that if you haven’t read certain Star Wars books — or all the Star Wars books — you’ve failed to meet some kind of imaginary prerequisite to joining the fandom.
Which is so incredibly not true, if you didn’t already know. I like to say that the only requirement for being a Star Wars fan is that you like Star Wars. The same concept applies specifically to the books. If you’ve read one Star Wars book, you’re a fan — if you liked it, that is.
While fandom tends to put a lot of pressure on readers who want to feel part of a community to stay up-to-date on releases and have a sweeping knowledge of all that’s come before, the concept of “comfort reading” is probably more common than you think. We just don’t talk about it enough.
Many people read for comfort, and this often takes the form of rereading books they’ve read before and loved. There is nothing wrong with rereading books, especially if those books provide whatever comfort you need in any given moment. Some need to escape. Others want to coax their emotions to the surface. There are dozens of reasons you might read a book you’ve already read.
And doing this — even with Star Wars — has so many potential benefits.
A Reread Could Change Your Perspective
When I reread Heir to the Jedi four years after first experiencing it, I saw the book in a completely new light. If you didn’t love a Star Wars book the first time you read it, there’s of course no guarantee that reading it again will change your mind.
But it could.
And even if you liked a book the first time and dive into it again, it’s quite possible you will gain a deeper understanding of certain characters or events, notice things you didn’t before, or make connections to other Star Wars stories that didn’t occur to you when you first absorbed the book in question.
Another example of this: I’ve read the Ahsoka novel three times, each in a different format, spaced years apart. The book has meant something different to meach each time I’ve read it — despite the actual book never changing. In the context of Star Wars, a book can hit different after multiple reads for several reasons.
One: New media might allow us to view a particular story in a new context. (“Recontextualizing” is, in fact, not a bad thing.) One of the reasons Ahsoka was a completely different read for me the second time was because I picked it up after watching the Clone Wars finale, which came out four years after the book was first published in 2016.
And two: We bring to books what we’re feeling and experiencing in the moment. I read Ronin in the middle of preparing for a big move across the country, and I knew even as I was reading it that I wasn’t fully experiencing what the story had to offer. I was overwhelmed, distracted, and worried about life things. That book, while brilliant, requires a lot of focus and determination to really appreciate.
When I read the book again someday, I can’t wait to experience it when I’m in a better place (literally and figuratively), when I can give it the attention and appreciation it deserves.
Sometimes a book just isn’t going to do it for you the first time. And that’s pretty normal, I’ve come to realize.
You May Never Read Every Star Wars Book — and That’s OK
I’m so sorry to break this to you, but it may not actually be possible to read every Star Wars book in your lifetime. Some of you may have, and you may be close, and for that I genuinely applaud you.
But with so many novels releasing every year, and this particular genre of licensed publishing having been around since the 1970s, it would be quite a feat to have read everything Star Wars publishing has to offer — especially if you go beyond the novels.
And honestly, even if you did read all of them … you’d eventually have to go back and reread some of them to remember what you may have read years or even decades ago. Rereading is almost inevitable if you love these stories so much that you want to revisit details or things you may have missed.
There are many fair arguments against rereading Star Wars books. There is only so much time to read, and many find their time best spent reading new books. (Rereading is a very small percentage of my yearly reading, so I get it.) Not everyone owns their Star Wars books, and library holds can take months depending on the book. (Maybe you don’t want to deprive someone else of the chance to read a book they haven’t read yet when you already did.)
The potential list goes on. At the end of the day, one beautiful thing about reading Star Wars books is that you are mostly in control of your how, what, and why. If you want to reread for comfort, you can. If you want to remember a book you once loved or re-experience a book you didn’t, you can.
And if you want to embark on an epic journey to read though every Star Wars book ever made? You can choose that life as well. It is completely up to you.
Now This Is Lit is a podcast (and newsletter!) about Star Wars books, the people who make them, and the readers who just can’t get enough of them. You can find the show wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to the Substack for more deep dives, guides, interview transcripts, and book love.