Rebecca Jennings, in "In defense of reading the same book over and over again": “We know how Harry Potter will end, and, more importantly, how that ending will make us feel.”
I like to read Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy over again because it puts me in touch with the moral order. The story contains ordinary people who display decency and moral courage when confronted with someone in need; or a situation that needs rectifying. I find the same qualities in the Harry Potter series, and in a mainstream bestseller such as Nelson DeMille’s Up Country.
Aristotle’s Poetics suggests that the arts enable us to have, vicariously, experiences we need to experience in order to broaden our awareness and deepen our humanity.
Like Jennings, we return to works that afford us this.
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