Philip Hensher

You have to reread – the surface amusements of plot, subject and mystery drop away, the deeper pleasures of prose and reflection stay. I must have read some favourite novels 30 times – Natalia Ginzburg's Lessico Famigliare, PG Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters, Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods and Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. The most memorable rereadings in my life have been of Proust, who I read when I was 16, 18, 30 and 40 – every time a different novel. It used to be a big farce about duchesses; these days it's about how to make sense of the world around you. I don't think you can read Proust, only reread, making adjustments and corrections and changes in understanding as you go.

Geoff Dyer

"I'm not a great rereader...": Geoff Dyer. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

Funnily enough, I recently reread part of Wendy Lesser's book on rereading, Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering, and then I bought another book on the same subject – a kind of rewriting, I suppose – called On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks. Clearly, this is an issue worth revisiting. If I'm reviewing a book I always read it twice – I re-view it – as a courtesy to the writer and to persuade myself that I haven't missed something. Otherwise I'm not a great rereader – or at least, I'm a failed one: I decide to reread something I read 20 years ago and then give up because the original experience, presumed forgotten, turns out to have been mysteriously preserved, like a leaf between the pages. Or I try again to read something I failed to get through three times before and end up falling at exactly the same fence. The exceptions are rather surprising: I've reread On the Road and Tender is the Night a bunch of times, always fearing that they will fall short of my teenage infatuation – but they never do. The novel I've read most often in the past 20 years – about six times – is Don DeLillo's The Names; it is like a trance. And then there's the epic I don't reread so much as never stop reading: David Thomson's A Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Ian Rankin

"The book that sticks in my mind is Rivals by Jilly Cooper,": Ian Rankin. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

There are certain books (and poems) that I reread with pleasure. These range from Bleak House to TS Eliot's Four Quartets, and from Anthony Powell's 12-novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I've probably reread Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie more than any other book, partly because I studied it at university and partly because I glean something new with each reading. With Eliot, I find that the older I get, the more I understand – as is true of Shakespeare. But the book that sticks in my mind is Rivals by Jilly Cooper. We were snowed in one winter, and this was the only book in the house I'd not read (it belonged to my wife). I found it great fun, and decided to reread it the following summer – then again many a summer after that. Pure escapism and a non-guilty pleasure.

Marina Warner

"I usually worry that I'll be disappointed if I revisit old favourites,": Marina Warner.

I retain strong flashes of certain moments from much-loved writers: emblematic scenes such as when the eponymous hero in Elizabeth Bowen's marvellous story The Demon Lover presses his fiancée so closely to his chest that his military button bites deep into her hand, branding her so that she can't ever rid herself of his hold. But when I go back to the works I've loved, they've often become different in ways that show me how much I've changed; so I usually worry that I'll be disappointed if I revisit old favourites. What about Jack Kerouac now? Or Lawrence Durrell? I daren't try. I returned to Wuthering Heights and was dismayed by Heathcliff's brutality. But I continually, compulsively, reread fiction-in-poetry that itself keeps changing, as new translations and new revisionings come out, like The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason, who recasts Homer via Borges; Alice Oswald's Memorial, where she dissembles and reassembles The Iliad to make a war requiem for our times, and the late Christopher Logue's "accounts" of Homer in his extraordinary, passionate War Music.

Mark Watson

"I find rereading a strange activity...": Mark Watson. Photograph: Joe McGorty

The one book I've read more than a couple of times is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, a baffling and brilliant novel. It's full of footnotes, digressions and other distractions, so it rewards the time spent revisiting it. Even this book, though, hasn't been off my shelf for years. I find rereading a strange activity in general. Every week 10 or 20 books are published which would enrich your life if you read them, and then there's a backlog of several centuries, and even then there are the bloody Greeks to catch up on. With this impossible wealth of literature to pick from, retreading old ground seems like being one of those people who stay in the same guesthouse in Lyme Regis every summer rather than get out the atlas. I think it's important to keep travelling, as it were. Not that there's anything wrong with Lyme.

Hilary Mantel

"A good book is never the same twice...": Hilary Mantel. Photograph: Sarah Lee

You have to find out by experience what everyone tells you: that a good book is never the same twice. Rereading is a pleasure and duty of middle age, and illuminating, even if it only sheds light on how you yourself have changed. In 2010, during a long spell in hospital, I reread Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, written in the 1950s and 60s and set during the second world war. A novel is different when you read as a practitioner, and I saw that the first book in particular, Men at Arms, offers a masterclass in structure. The three novels were much, much funnier than I remember from when I read them at 17 – then, I saw Guy Crouchback's solemn Catholic agonies but I did not see how far they made him a figure of comic futility as well as quiet tragedy. This time around my bourgeois pleasure was enhanced by reading the trilogy in a Folio Society edition, rather than a grubby library book. It glowed like something living amid the grey beeping machines.

Mohsin Hamid

"In the two decades that I have been writing novels myself I have reread infrequently...": Mohsin Hamid.

I tend to reread small books. This wasn't always the case – when I was younger I reread long volumes too. I spent many a summer making my way, again and again, through Tolkien's capacious fantasies and Frank Herbert's sprawling sci-fi. But in the two decades that I have been writing novels myself I have reread infrequently, and what I have reread has mostly been short. Books such as Tabucchi's Pereira Declares tug me back now, or Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. Perhaps it is because I find the slender, literary long-form innately interesting. Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels – with fewer pages of plot to them – are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.

Jilly Cooper

"Rereading is crucial!" Jilly Cooper. Photograph: Francesco Guidicini/Rex Features

Rereading is crucial. If a plot of a book grabs me I gallop to the end, and only on later readings appreciate the depth of the characters, the wit, or the beauty of the language. Poetry I reread constantly. Currently on the bathroom shelf, their pages wrinkled with being dropped in the bath, are Tennyson, Housman, Ezra Pound, Yeats and Eliot's Four Quartets. With fiction I frequently reread Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time and Barbara Pym's Jane and Prudence. With other books I tend to seek favourite passages: the glorious end of The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, or the last, heartbreakingly lovely scene from The Boy with a Cart by Christopher Fry. In my youth I joyfully devoured Proust then shamingly abandoned him, until last night. Waiting for the dogs to dawdle in from the garden, I picked up a volume of A La Recherche and was utterly blown away by the description of a party where the Duke of Guermantes is distributing varying degrees of largesse, his outstretched hand swimming through the room like a "shark fin". Back in bed I read until dawn.

Julie Myerson

"I almost never reread. Life just seems too short...": Julie Myerson. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

I almost never reread. Life just seems too short – there's so much out there I still haven't read. But I'm also reluctant to try to repeat experiences. What if the magic isn't there a second time? I think there are only four novels that I've gone back to – Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier, The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald and The Magus by John Fowles – and my reason for rereading was quite surgically precise. I first read them as a teenager and was dazzled; now, as a writer, I wanted to try to unpick them, unlock the mystery, see how it worked. I failed completely, of course. They're still brilliant and dazzling, and they all still remain as tightly furled and secret as they ever were. And if I had to pick a single one of those to keep on rereading? It would be between Meaulnes and Gatsby… don't make me choose. Both are so much more than the sum of their parts – painful, truthful, slippery, perfect. I don't really understand either of them and I suppose I'm happy to keep it that way.

John Gray

"I will never stop rereading Borges's Fictions.": John Gray Photograqph: Eamonn Mccabe for the Guardian

In order to have the time to re-read the books you love most you must curtail your reading of other books, and it's a sacrifice I'm happy to make in the case of JL Borges's Fictions. It was probably in the late 60s that I first read the book, and I must have reread the short, gnomic stories dozens of times. Part of the book's inexhaustible charm is Borges's style, which even in translation has an inimitable, lapidary clarity. None of the stories is more haunting than "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", in which an imaginary world, portrayed in a mysterious encyclopedia, disrupts and disintegrates the world that we take to be real. The narrator hints that he means the tale (first published in Argentina in May 1940) as a mocking critique of systems of ideas – "dialectical materialism, antisemitism, nazism" – whose power depends on creating an illusion of order. With its playful yet deeply earnest scepticism, this beautiful story liberates the reader from every false and demeaning certainty. As a tonic for the mind, Borges's Fictions never fails, and I will never stop rereading it.

Andrew O'Hagan

"I've been reading the same books for 30 years. Now and again I'll let another one in, just to see what it feels like...": Andrew O'Hagan. Photograph: Tricia Malley and Ross Gillespie

I've been reading the same books for 30 years. Now and again I'll let another one in, just to see what it feels like, but essentially it's the same old devils that keep me up. And when I read a great new book the experience tends to have the quality of rereading: I feel the book has known me all my life. A well-made book is a thing that continues its own making. It doesn't let up, and neither should you. I sometimes wish I could read stuff that was disposable, but, sad sack that I am, I seldom meet a thriller, seldom meet a page-turner, that doesn't make me pine for Boswell's The Life of Johnson again. I never set out to be well read but I did always want to be well reread. I scout around and I pay attention to what's coming out, but being a good reader, I feel, is probably a bit like being a good family man: at some point you have to give up on promiscuity and just settle with the people you really love.

It's my habit to read novels like you read poems. I've been rereading the poems of Yeats, Burns, Coleridge and Wallace Stevens since I was young. And I find fresh truths there every year, just as, over time, you find new lines on your face… and the joy is seeing them and knowing they were always just waiting to emerge, and for you to find them. We live in such a period of fearfulness about age – such cultural hysteria about time's expense – that we can forget how lovely it is to advance. There's a kind of vitality that comes only with age, and that matters in several areas of your life, not least in your life as a reader. Simply put: you don't read The Great Gatsby the same way at 50 as you do at 25. By 50, you might know something about the costs of idealism, the penalties of romance, the management of delusion, the persistence of hope or the expanding nature of your capacity for wonder. If so, you'll simply be a better reader of the book.

With Gatsby, Madame Bovary, Tess of the D'Urbervilles or A House for Mr Biswas, it's likely the book will grow with you. Some books won't unlock themselves to the first-time reader. And that's a nice thing to hold on to: a great book is its very own elixir; it will show you, each time you pick it up, that you are fitter for the task of reading it than you ever were before.

Joe Dunthorne

"I reread paragraphs, pages or scenes if they contain something I want to steal for my own work.": Joe Dunthorne. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Guardian

Since I sleep in the shadow of my to-read pile, it would feel dangerously irresponsible to read the same book twice. I do, however, reread paragraphs, pages or scenes if they contain something I want to steal for my own work. While writing my latest novel the book I most often turned to was White Noise by Don DeLillo. I reread his echoing dialogue – with characters who never seem to hear each other – and his jokes that don't sound like jokes. More than anything I wanted to know how he sustained the book's central set piece, a 60-page mini-masterpiece called the Airborne Toxic Event. He managed to seamlessly combine the ordinary – a bickering family car journey – with the extraordinary – a chemical cloud blooming in the rear-view mirror. But no amount of rereading could make this scene give up its secrets.

Tessa Hadley

"I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones.": Tessa Hadley. Photograph: Eamon McCabe/Eamonn McCabe

I probably reread novels more often than I read new ones. The novel form is made for rereading. Novels are by their nature too long, too baggy, too full of things – you can't hold them completely in your mind. This isn't a flaw – it's part of the novel's richness: its length, multiplicity of aspects, and shapelessness resemble the length and shapelessness of life itself. By the time you reach the end of the novel you will have forgotten the beginning and much of what happens in between: not the main outlines but the fine work, the detail and the music of the sentences – the particular words, through which the novel has its life. You think you know a novel so well that there must be nothing left in it to discover but the last time I reread Emma I found a little shepherd boy, brought into the parlour to sing for Harriet when she's staying with the Martin family. I'm sure he was never in the book before.

John Banville

"Inevitably [rereading] brings on a certain disenchantment." John Banville. Photograph: Kim Haughton for the Guardian

The more often we reread a favourite classic the more of its secrets it gives up: each time we revisit it we see more clearly the cogs and flywheels of the writer's technique behind what at first had been its opaque and burnished surface. Inevitably this brings on a certain disenchantment. The only book I know of that successfully resists this process is The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald's novel is not "great" in the way that War and Peace or Beethoven's Ninth Symphony are great – and is all the better for it. Fitzgerald was forever the inspired amateur, and Gatsby has all the tremulousness and delicacy of a masterpiece made against the odds. He managed it once and never again – but what an achievement it is, a kind of miracle, ever fresh, ever new, no matter how many times one ventures back into its sad, soiled and enchanted world.

Jackie Kay

"At 19 I'd never come across anybody like Toni Morrison. At 50 I still haven't.": Jackie Kay. Photograph: Gary Calton

I first read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye when I was 19. It struck a deep chord. It was the voice that first drew me: richly textured, wonderfully comic, deeply lyrical, infused with the music of gospels and the blues, it pulled me in and didn't let me go. Since then I've often returned to Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who desperately wants the bluest eyes in the world, as if those eyes could change the way she sees things and is seen. Written in the 60s, when the Black is Beautiful movement was forming, The Bluest Eye was a deep enquiry into the tragic consequences of self-loathing. "How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?" Pecola asks, late one night. Claudia MacTeer, the nine-year-old narrator, doesn't know. Later in this moving novel she discovers that "love is never any better than the lover". Morrison's first book is all about love, the way it can shape and mould you, if given; the way it stunts and silences you if withheld.

Morrison takes the Dick and Jane children's book of happy white families and deconstructs it, making her reader question what makes a story. How she manages to retain Pecola's dignity and shifts the point of view are what keep me coming back to this wee gem of a book, as affecting a coming-of-age story as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Member of the Wedding or The Catcher in the Rye. Morrison is often compared to Faulkner. I think she's even better – her black characters have such an authentic voice. Each time I reread The Bluest Eye I find something new. Thank goodness for Toni Morrison – she made me see with fresh eyes, holding up an uncomfortable mirror. In her world the invisible becomes visible, and silence speaks. At 19 I'd never come across anybody like her. At 50 I still haven't. Toni Morrison is in a class of her own.