Reading a Nancy Drew mystery to my children recently, I came across a passage that is pure apple-pie Americana. Pursuing a carful of thieves, the teenage sleuth “drove as rapidly as the law permitted,” wrote the pseudonymous Carolyn Keene. The line is ludicrous, irresistible, a finger in the eye of every Jazz Age flapper or proto-hippie. It meant nothing to me as an eight-year-old, when I first made my way through the Nancy Drew canon. Thirty-six years later, I feel as though I’ve unearthed a time capsule.

Reopening books is like that. Take them up again after enough years have passed and you are almost certain to find fresh paths through their forests. Occasionally, the changing times are responsible for the alteration. That Nancy’s lawfulness so startles is at least arguably a sign of societal decay. More often, it is we ourselves who are different. The death of Beth in Little Women is deeply moving when one encounters it as a teenager. When one has children of one’s own, the same pages are excruciating.

Consider The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s superb 2001 National Book Award winner. When that novel came out, I was a college senior pining for an academic career. Of course I took as a favorite character Chip Lambert, an enfant terrible who stumbles into and out of a swanky assistant professorship. Returning to the book in early middle age, I found myself caring more about Chip’s brother, Gary, whose family life more closely mirrored my own. I suppose I will shift my allegiances to the siblings’ elderly parents if I read the novel again as a retiree.

Or what about 1984, which I, like many on the right, sit down with every few years? At 13, I found the book straightforwardly distressing, a nightmarish saga of spiritual oppression. Five years later, I smirked at its depiction of rebellion against the state through sex. Five years after that, I understood that few other rebellions would do. In their rented space above an antique shop, Winston and Julia assert a full and private humanity. “In this room I’m going to be a woman” is not only Julia’s pledge but the cry of Eve herself, laying claim to a prelapsarian dignity.

In extreme cases, a political sea change can remove a book from one ideological camp and place it in another. Reading John le Carré as a George W. Bush Republican, I resented his depiction of Western intelligence services as clumsily malign. Today, the same narratives seem positively Trumpist, and it is the Left that has reason to view the British master with scorn. Needless to say, the words themselves are unaltered. (One assumes the literary bowdlerizers haven’t gotten around to The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.) What is responsible for the evolution? Events, dear boy, events!

It is a great book that can accommodate a changing world — or seem even to anticipate it. Though self-immolation had existed for millennia when Tolkien wrote The Return of the King, the suicide-by-fire of Denethor feels eerily prophetic given recent instances of the practice. (“The West has failed,” the steward of Gondor howls.) The Gospel of John, divinely inspired, is perhaps an unfair example of literary prescience. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore that Pontius Pilate’s deconstructionism (“What is truth?”) predicts that of American college presidents from sea to shining sea.

Talk of Tolkien brings to mind a line from C. S. Lewis’s review of The Two Towers, published a year after the novel’s 1954 appearance. “Though we must ration ourselves in our rereadings,” Lewis wrote, “I have little doubt that the book will soon take its place among the indispensables.” As is frequently the case, even a minor insight from Lewis gets at an essential reality. Return too often to a beloved work and it can lose its freshness. Rob it of its capacity to surprise and half its power may be gone.

Like, I suspect, many other readers of this magazine, I have committed that error on more than one occasion. Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), in my opinion the finest English-language novel of the 21st century, can never again be to me what it once was. I stupidly wore it out. Nor am I likely to take up the short stories of Tobias Wolff with anything like my previous delight. Whole pages are burned into my memory. In a way, selective amnesia would be an extraordinary blessing, allowing me to approach old favorites as if for the first time. As a critic and teacher, I would, of course, be ruined. But the deliciousness of the experience would go a long way toward redeeming the bargain.

Perhaps the mark of a true masterpiece is that its fabric can’t be worn thin. For my wife, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance is such a book, providing nearly endless stores of literary tension. Other readers feel similarly about Charles Dickens, however allergic to the Victorian’s maudlin moralizing I have long been. At least two women of my acquaintance devour Pride and Prejudice annually, with seemingly nothing in the way of diminishing returns. Give me, against anything else in English letters, the three chapters comprising Darcy’s first proposal, his letter, and Elizabeth’s reflection on the same. One could read them a thousand times and still discover fresh ironies and insights.

My own list of inexhaustible classics contains familiar names. Wuthering Heights, a novel of strange complexity and beauty, would be addictive even if it didn’t possess, in Heathcliff, one of the most fascinating characters in literature. The Great Gatsby is as perfect a work of prose as an American author has yet produced. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! can hardly be grasped in fewer than three pass-throughs, so elaborate is its narrative structure. Not for the first time, it occurs to me that these books are, in many ways, telling the same story. Perhaps I simply like love affairs interrupted by barriers of ethnicity or class. Or perhaps the writers in question have hit upon a fundamental Anglo-American archetype. The rereader of great literature may consider such matters at his leisure.

By any reasonable standard, the novels I’ve mentioned are masterworks. But surely I am not alone in rereading trash. Among my most dog-eared paperbacks is The Pillars of the Earth (1989), Ken Follett’s pulpy saga of cathedral-building and lust. Leon Uris’s Trinity (1976) is a despicable paean to Irish terrorism but was nevertheless one of the beloved books of my adolescence. I will surely come back to it for the dozenth time or so one of these years. I have lost count of how often I have read John Grisham’s early-career potboilers, despite characters as one-dimensional as fairground caricatures. Give me The Rainmaker (1995), a sofa, and a football game and I’m set for the afternoon. So breezily uncomplicated is Grisham’s prose that I can read four or five sentences during each huddle.

If opening an unread book is an intellectual exercise, returning to a familiar one is often a matter of the heart. Yes, a great novel can instruct anew when one brings to it a fresh perspective, but the joys of long acquaintance are their own particular bliss. Like eating a favorite meal, I take up Howards End again — or Emma, or Jane Eyre, or Heart of Darkness — and savor my most loved ingredients. Never mind that every flavor is known to me already. I will happily take another bite.

Was Lewis wrong, then, about rationing? I think not. It is rather the case that some books speak to one so profoundly, or re-create so poignantly the reading pleasures of one’s youth, that they can hardly be used up. A ration, after all, brings to mind scarcity, deprivation. Given a deep enough well, the water may never run dry.