Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
People who are busy doing things - as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.
A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.
If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.
