If you are a veteran of the newsletter that preceded this blog, you'll know that I've been known to re-read books. In 1984, I re-read 1984. When a new translation of The Stranger was done, I read the new version of The Stranger. And I've re-read other books.
Every time I re-read a book, I find that even though the book has not changed, I have.
Time and again I found the same thing that Verlyn Klinkenborg found. He recently wrote, "Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader" in the The New York Times.
I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times...
But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat... And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater...
The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading...
Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.
The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger...
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