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The reward runs deeper than comfort, though. In 2012, the researchers Cristel Russell and Sidney Levy studied what they called volitional reconsumption, the deliberate rereading of books, rewatching of films and revisiting of places. Their subjects, they found, did not come back for the story. They came back to measure themselves. The book stays fixed while the reader keeps changing, so returning to a novel at forty that first moved you at twenty is less a repeat than a comparison, the text a steady ruler held up against your own growth. In her book ‘On Rereading’, the scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks confessed to treating the habit as a sinful self-indulgence, then spent a whole year doing it on purpose. Vladimir Nabokov put it most sharply of all. One cannot read a book, he said; one can only reread it. The person with the battered paperback is not stuck in the past. They are quietly noticing who they have become.