Well, a novel is less likely to be rereadable than, say, _ANSI Common Lisp_, because you'd use the latter as a reference. I sometimes reread novels, but only the really especially good ones, if I remember that I've read it before. In general, I don't read novels for perspective, though it's really nice when there's some to be gained, rare though that is.

I've probably read somewhere around 10K books, the vast majority of which were novels, and way more than half of which were not really worth reading had my time been as limited as it later became. When I was a teen, it was easy to finish two or three books a day of stuff I'd throw against the wall by chapter two, now. The fact that I've read it and finished it is no indicator of worth. :)

Anyway, I used to own a coupla thousand books, but after moving several times without having looked inside most of them, it dawned on me that carrying around all this dead tree was not very useful.