Yea, I have re-read things for goals as well. I also re-read things for the mental approach it may instill for a period of time while and after reading it, to enjoy it (like you said), or to see how the perspective fits to my new mental models a few years later. Three fiction books I constantly go back to at different times are Brave New World, The Alchemist, and Prey.I'm curious what books others go back to over time.
bArray|5 months ago
I feel my mental model actively changing. I read something last night (a great book on genetic programming) that I could feel actively unwinding an undeserved bias of a previous self and opening a new path for creativity.
Sadly, I suspect many actually do not make any real progress in developing their mental models. Some, after many years, I have the same conversations with about fundamentally the same subjects.
> I'm curious what books others go back to over time.
For me, George Orwell's 1984 & Animal Farm, various short classic stories, etc. If our learning processes are somewhat a support vector machine, I try to reinforce the ideas that originally drastically changed my internal model.
It's not always books and media either. I listened to Mao's Great Famine [1] over several days - and it's harrowing. I like to revisit foods that remind me of childhood (flashes of memory from being younger than 2), like orange & mango juice, and strawberry & banana smoothie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao%27s_Great_Famine