'It Can Stand Rereading Because It Is Very Full'

A reader asks what books I have read most often. Just this week I read Leonard Gardner’s boxing novel Fat City and watched John Huston’s 1972 film version. It  remains the sole novel Gardner, now eighty-eight, has published. I first read it as a senior in high school, shortly after it was published in 1969, and again every decade or so since, even though I have no interest in boxing. 

In 2009, the late D.G. Myers and I haggled over a bibliography of the “Best American Fiction, 1968–1998.” It was David’s idea. One of the titles on my initial list of nominees was Fat City. There was much give and take. David objected to Gardner’s inclusion, so his novel was scratched. I remember taking exception to junk he suggested by Philip K. Dick and Gilbert Sorrentino, also removed. I still haven’t read seven of the books David included.

 

What else have I read many times? Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Rasselas – all from the eighteenth century. Ulysses, Liebling’s Between Meals. Nonfiction and poetry are tougher to gauge. I’ve seldom read a collection of poems straight through, front to back. By its nature, poetry is revisited in small servings, not gorged on. I’ve read Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination countless times in the last forty-one years, but never sequentially.

 

Lately, a passage from Jacques Barzun’s Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (1991) has been making the rounds. In his essay “The Word: Written, Printed, Spoken,” Barzun admits Americans read “tons of books,” but adds, “What they rarely read is real books.”

 

“How is ‘real book’ defined? Quite simply: it is a book one wants to reread. It can stand rereading because it is very full — of ideas and feelings, of scenes and persons real or imagined, of strange accidents and situations and judgments of behavior: it is a world in itself, like and unlike the world already in our head. For this reason, this fullness, it may well be ‘hard to get into’. But it somehow compels one to keep turning the page, and at the end the wish to reread is clear and strong: one senses that the work contains more than met the eye the first time around.”

 

If a book is lousy, we read it once, if that. If it’s harmless fluff, escapist fare, once suffices. A small, exclusive shelf of books remains. Those last a lifetime. Barzun continues:

 

“Now the point of reading books habitually is that it affords lasting pleasure, so the school should at least give every child a chance of contracting the habit. But it is not the adult citizen’s duty to read good books, even if Mark Twain did point out that ‘the man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.’”