For the last four summers I've pulled the same battered paperback off the shelf around the same week, cracked it open at the same chapter, and let it pull me back into a conversation I thought I had finished. It's not a new book. It's not even a particularly fashionable one. It is Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, dog-eared, water-stained from a Byron Bay holiday, and held together with a piece of tape I keep meaning to replace.
What began as a casual experiment after a friend in Melbourne handed me his tattered copy has turned into something closer to a personal annual review. The book is the same, the pages are the same, but I am not. Each reread surfaces different lines, different worries, and different small wisdoms I missed the year before. This is what a yearly reread has actually done for me, and why I think more readers across Australia should give it a shot.
Meditations is the kind of book people either venerate or shelve. The Roman emperor's private notebooks were never meant to be published, let alone become a lifestyle staple for people in their thirties trying to optimise their mornings. I came to it through a friend at a Brunswick book club who insisted it would "sort me out" during a particularly volatile work year. He was half right.
The book is short, dense, and completely uninterested in impressing you. It rewards rereading because it is a record of someone trying, daily, to be a slightly better version of himself. That ambition feels different at twenty-six, thirty-two, and now, in my late thirties, when the goals themselves have shifted. The same lines about discipline, about wasted time, about other people's opinions have landed in completely different parts of my life across each reading.
I started the habit by accident. I'd finished the book in February one year and, instead of picking up something new, I left it on the kitchen bench in our rental in Adelaide. A few weeks later, with the South Australian summer dragging on, I picked it up again. I wanted something I didn't have to commit to, something that wouldn't demand fresh attention. The reread was lazy at first. It quickly became revealing.
A yearly reread gives you a built-in benchmark. You can chart the year against your margin notes. Did I get any better at the things I said I'd work on? Did the lines about grief, about friendship, about how little we control, still sting, or had I grown past them? It's an oddly Australian thing to do, actually, given how much we love a public rebrand - the New Year's resolution, the January fitness push, the post-Easter "new me" energy. A private ritual that runs in parallel feels quieter, and more honest.
The book never changes. My reading of it does. The first year I underlined every line about action and discipline. The second year I skipped past those and lingered on the sections about death and the shortness of life. Last year, in Sydney during a brutal run of meetings, I read the passages about other people's noise and felt my shoulders drop halfway down the page.
This is the strange gift of a familiar book. The text is a mirror, but the reflection is time-delayed. You bring a new year's worth of failure, small grief, friendships ended and started, jobs gained and lost. The book holds steady. You do the emotional recalibrating. Friends who reread favourite novels - I've heard this from readers in Perth, Brisbane and Hobart - describe identical shifts in emphasis between reads.
A yearly reading habit slots neatly into the Australian calendar if you let it. I tend to start mine in late December, when the country slows between Christmas and New Year and you can hear crickets in the suburbs. The long summer break, the cricket on the radio, the Boxing Day test, the slow drift toward Australia Day - there's a reflective lull that the southern hemisphere gives us that our northern cousins rarely get in the same way.
I also reread during the colder months, often on long flights between Melbourne and Perth, or on the couch after a wet weekend on the Mornington Peninsula. The book travels well because it is small, philosophical, and endlessly re-readable. Australian reading culture gets a lot of credit for being beach-heavy, and rightly so, but some of the best reread moments happen indoors, with rain on the windows and a flat white going cold on the table.
Meditations is not the only book I treat this way. My wife rereads Tim Winton's Breath every couple of years because the surf chapters hit differently after a difficult stretch at work. I keep a battered copy of Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things on the shelf for the darker months, and a Craig Silvey novel that I return to whenever I need reminding that ordinary Australian lives can carry extraordinary interior weight.
There's a wider pattern here. Australian novels, in particular, seem to reward a second visit. Winton's Cloudstreet, Michelle de Kretser's The Life to Come, Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang - these books reward the reader who returns, because the country itself keeps shifting beneath them. A yearly reread of an Australian novel is also, in a small way, a yearly reread of Australia.
The site covers personal branding a fair bit, so let me tie this back to that. The most consistent personal brand I have is the one I have built slowly, through repetition and small public choices. A yearly reread works the same way. You are not performing growth; you are simply leaving a record of it for yourself.
The habit has also reshaped how I read new books. I take more notes now. I underline less. I let the second and third readings happen by design rather than accident. There is a quiet confidence that comes from knowing you have a stable text to return to, while everything else in your life - work, friendships, fitness goals, style experiments - keeps moving. The book becomes the fixed point. You orbit it, year after year, and gradually the orbit becomes your own life.
If the idea appeals, a few practical notes from my own messy attempt.
If any of this sounds familiar, or if you have a book you already reread without admitting it, I'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment below, send a message through the contact page, or pitch me a guest piece for NexxtLevelUp about your own annual reread ritual. I am always looking for new ideas, sharp disagreements, and a good recommendation from someone in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or anywhere in between.