I'm reporting back here on the results of my not-a-new-normblog-poll. Going to a distant and lonely and low-tech place, would you (a) take 100 books you'd already read, or (b) range freely over books you hadn't? The picture is clear. There's an overwhelming majority for (b) - 4 to 1. I have 42 answers, with 34 going for (b), 6 for (a), and 2 'don't know's. That pretty much reflects my own leaning. I'd hate not to have Jane Austen, and there's a small number of other books I'd like to be able to re-read at some point. But I'd choose (b) without hesitation. And the reason is that for me so much of the thrill of reading is the 'newness' of what you're reading about.
In any case my question was prompted by this from Vladimir Nabokov:
Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.
I don't know if that looks better when not isolated from the context of argument in which it appears, but taking it just so, out of context, I'd want to say it was rather snootily dismissive of the enormous pleasure most people get from most of the reading they do. Not everyone is a scholar of the books they read; not even those who are scholars in some domain or other are this vis-à-vis all their reading. Not everyone is a student of literature or a literary critic. Even books you have loved can seem a chore if you have to re-read them too soon after reading them first time up. The suggestion that being a good reader requires re-reading is too prescriptive and too restrictive for my liking.
Readers of the world, unite. Reading is ours - everybody's. The hell with being ranked like that.