On Rereading

My guest today is Tom Milani. He's been generously filling in for me while I've juggled several deadlines. I always enjoy his thoughtful pieces, much like his today on rereading. He has me reflecting on the books I return to and why. I suspect you will, too. Here's more from Tom.

On Rereading

by Tom Milani

I like to reread books from certain authors. Knowing the plot and characters allows me to focus on things 

I may have missed the first time through, and I get something new each time I reread. There’s also comfort in the familiar. As I told another writer, it’s like watching a favorite movie (e.g., Collateral) a second or third time: it never disappoints.

Here I want to talk about two of the authors I regularly reread, what attracts me to their writing, and what I think they do particularly well.

George Pelecanos

For any crime writers in the DC metropolitan area, George Pelecanos needs no introduction. Author of over twenty novels, screenwriter on numerous shows (most famously The Wire), he’s firmly established in the crime fiction community. Pelecanos writes about the working class, people living in neighborhoods east of Rock Creek Park and often east of the Anacostia River, markers of economic and racial divides. He also peppers his books with local music references and venues, which adds a bit of nostalgia for anyone who grew up in the area. For me, his principal themes are what being a man means and the value of blue-collar work and public service. He does all this while telling fast-paced, compelling stories.

Several of his novels have recurring characters—Derek Strange, Dimitri Karras, Marcus Clay—so reading those books is like being among friends, or at least people you know well. One of my favorites of Pelecanos’s books is probably one of his lesser-known works. A Firing Offence and Nick’s Trip, his first two novels, are first-person PI stories featuring Nick Stefanos. Shoedog, his third novel, is a multiple-POV standalone. Then came Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, his last first-person PI novel (though not his last PI novel). For me, it’s his best title and also one of his darkest books.

It begins, “Like most of the trouble that’s happened in my life or that I’ve caused to happen, the trouble that happened that night started with a drink.” 

Nick Stefanos wakes up after having driven blackout drunk to the banks of the Anacostia River, only to find a murdered teenager. By the end of the novel, some justice has been served, but it’s the roughest kind, and Nick is back where he began: “Inside, the room was silent, bathed in blue neon. I went behind the bar. I poured myself a bourbon and pulled a bottle of beer from the ice.”

Elizabeth Hand

A multi-genre, multi-award-winning author, Elizabeth Hand has written four mysteries featuring anti-hero Cass Neary. In these four novels, Elizabeth Hand balances deep dives into photography, mythology, and history with Cass Neary’s dissolution and longing, her addiction and trauma, all while telling compelling stories. Cass’s fifteen minutes of fame began with Dead Girls, her book of photography published after she gained notoriety from her art show of the same name. 

Cass describes how she chooses her subjects: “I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead.” Cass herself is also damaged, perhaps from the death of her mother, perhaps from the benign neglect of her father, but comes unglued after a sexual assault.

All this backstory, found in Generation Loss, plays a role in the three succeeding books in the series: Available Dark, Hard Light, and The Book of Lamps and Banners, but it’s the last one in the series that I want to focus on. The first few sentences establish the mood for the novel and provide enough detail so that even readers who haven’t read the previous books can form a solid picture of Cass’s character: Much of the tube was still shut down. Another car had plowed through a Go Happy London! tour group the day before, this time near Tower Bridge. I’d taken the night train from Penzance, nodding off between shots of Jack Daniel’s before trying to resurrect my amphetamine jag with one of the Vyvanse I’d stolen a few days earlier.

The novel’s title is a reference to an ancient text of the same name, “rumored to have been written by Aristotle for his student Alexander the Great. Aristotle supposedly illustrated it, and there were handwritten notes to Alexander as well, and references to other people Aristotle knew. Eudemus. Plato.” The physical text has power, people around it die, and people who want to own it will kill.

But there’s more. Tindra Bergstrand, a gifted programmer, is developing Ludus Mentis, an app to heal. As she tells Cass, “But once I get the bugs worked out, the app can be used for all sorts of things. Trauma, insomnia, ADHD. Regulating mood disorders without drugs. Addiction. Libido. Everything.” The bugs are the problem, bringing trauma to the surface, rather than healing it, but the code embedded within the ancient text is the solution: 

Whoever wrote it had figured out how a combination of lights and symbols can change the way we think. Their book drew on knowledge that had already been around for thousands of years, things the ancient Egyptians knew, and the Sumerians, the Minoans. So “lamps and banners” is just shorthand for what we call code.

Cass’s skepticism informs her actions at the end of the novel. I hope Elizabeth Hand writes another Cass Neary mystery; the last lines suggest she might: 

Gryffin watched me as I stood, his expression almost wistful. 

He raised his glass to me and nodded. “Stay out of trouble.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” I said, and headed for the door.

What books do you like to reread, and why? Let me know in the comments.

***

Tom Milani’s (www.tommilani.com) short fiction has appeared in several anthologies and online. His stories have been shortlisted twice for a Derringer, been an honorable mention for The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 and selected for The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2026 and for The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year 2026. Places That Are Gone, his debut novel, will be reissued by Open Road Media this fall.

The Thin Man Called

It's rare these days that I reread a story or book simply for the pleasure of it.

I do reread a number of things, I should stress, but almost exclusively because they're texts that I'm teaching in one or another of my classes (though perhaps there's some blurriness here, since I'm obviously assigning books on my syllabi that I enjoy or admire). This past semester, for example, I revisited—and marked up anew—several dozen stories and several novels, including works by classic writers Poe, Conan Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, Goodis, Highsmith and McBain (among many others) and books by contemporary authors Megan Abbott, Tana French, Mark Haddon, Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, and Steve Weddle (also among others).

But picking up a book I've already read and rereading it solely for fun? with no syllabi or lesson plans on the horizon? That's a luxury that seems tough to afford, when my TBR piles are towering with books I sometimes feel like I'll never get to enjoy. (It's a common problem for all writers and readers, I'd think, that we acquire books faster than we read them—something hopeful about it maybe.)

Given all that, a recent vacation brought a couple of treats. First, our good friends Barry and Meg Teasley passed along a very nice copy of the 1965 edition of Dashiell Hammett's complete novels, a terrific gift in so many ways. Barry and Meg hosted a baby shower for us nearly five years ago before our son, also named Dashiell, was born, and they'd given the book to my parents more recently, but I only got it myself when visiting over Fourth of July.

The second treat? Spur of the moment, I started reading The Thin Man again—a book I haven't taught and therefore haven't read in a long while. Just a couple of chapters, just to reacquaint myself, right? Then a couple led to a few, and a few led to a few more, and pretty soon I was engrossed again in the characters and the story while other books—new books, unread books, at least one I needed to read for the coming semester—fell at least briefly by the wayside.

It felt like playing hooky.

It felt good.

(And I should point out: I've recently been reading Karen Huston Karydes' provocative new study Hard-Boiled Anxiety: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Their Detectives, and her analysis about The Thin Man opened up some new perspectives on the book during this rereading—particularly her comments on the "two leveled" nature of the book, where she measured out both its jauntiness and frivolity on the one hand against its undercurrent of sadness, loneliness, and dissipation on the other. Proof that rereading, especially with age and with greater contexts, can reward with enriched insights.) 

What's interesting about all this: While it's rare for me to reread books for fun, there are a number of movies that I've rewatched—and, in fact, several movies that when I've caught them while flipping the channels, I usually settle in to watch the rest of them. I think of Unforgiven, for example, and then a handful of Hitchcock movies—Vertigo, Rear Window, North by Northwest—and then a couple of silly comedies which never fail to please, both classic (Sabrina) and newer (Blast from the Past, Clueless, 10 Things I Hate About You). But books? I'd be hard-pressed on that count.

I'm curious about others here. How often do you reread books? under what circumstances? and which books? And are you—like me—more likely to rewatch films than reread books? If so, why and which ones? 

Surely, with questions like that, I'll be adding even more titles to my TBR list—and my TBW list too, I guess!