A reader asks what novel I have read more often than any other. I’ve never recorded such things and have seldom read with any sort of plan. Often the next book comes as a surprise, even to me. Just this week I reread Robinson Crusoe on a whim. It’s certainly in the running for the title Most-Read Novel, in part because I’ve been reading it since I was a boy. Any survival story has a built-in interest, and many of us share the desert-island fantasy. Other contenders for most often read: Gulliver’s Travels and Rasselas. The motive in returning to such books is always the same: undiluted pleasure. I know some people find the idea of reading any book more than once baffling and even perverse, but as John Wilson writes in his latest essay for First Things:
“In my experience, as a
bookish person acquainted firsthand with many like-minded souls and connected
variously with a countless number of hard-core readers, rereading is quite
commonplace.”
I suspect rereading was a
more common practice among our ancestors. Fewer books were available. For a
dedicated reader, a favorite volume was a rare and precious thing – the Bible,
Shakespeare, Dickens. In the first volume of his memoir, A Cab at the Door
(1968), V.S. Pritchett describes his Uncle Arthur, who taught himself to read
as an adult with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, and read no other.
Wilson gets it:
“’But isn’t it incredibly
boring to reread a novel you’ve just finished?’ Not at all! I like to see how
the book is made, and I always catch things that I missed the first time
around. I savor bits that I particularly enjoyed on the initial reading;
encountering them again adds to the pleasure. If the writer in question is
aphoristic (like Muriel Spark, for instance), rereading reinforces my memory of
signature lines.”
4 comments:
People now 'read' movies over and over, like divine texts. (Michael Mann's 'Heat' is one that tends to attract obsessive attention. Clive James even found room for an essay on it in his most highbrow effort, 'Cultural Amnesia.') A couple of years ago I raved about 'The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq' to a French friend. He wasn't a reader, but being French he certainly knew who Houellebecq was. In fact, he had a decidedly unfavorable opinion of him. A week later we spoke again and it turned out he'd found a DVD of the film at the library. He liked it so much he watched it five times in a row. He was enraptured by it, and by Houellebecq also. But he still hasn't read one of his novels.
As an avid rereader I appreciate your commentary. On my own list of what I call "Lifetime Books" I count Alice in Wonderland, Jane Eyre, and The Brothers Karamazov among my most often reread books. I continually learn new things from rereading and find my own perspective changes as I age.
This sentence from Wilson's article describes my own practice exactly:
When I read a novel for the first time, I almost always reread it right away, unless I simply didn’t care for it (in which case I’m likely to have abandoned it early on).
There's another sort of re-reading, later on, that may go by the name "dipping into" -- which sounds almost trivial, but I have found it a serious part of my continuing acquaintance with a well loved book.
Thanks for posting about rereading. I'm heading out on a vacation soon and the tendency is to limit myself to only books I haven't read. I'm going to find a book or two to take that I have already read and would like to revisit. Shaking off a habit sometimes needs a little prodding.
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