“A good book, he concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your soul.”
Richard Flanagan (The Narrow Road to the Deep North).
No-one puts it better than Jennifer Egan on rereading Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth:
“I tend to reread it with the slight trepidation that the magic may have fled … but each time I find the novel’s tragic power intact … from the perils of living by one’s looks (teenage reading) to the cruelty of the world towards women (early adult reading) to the struggle for personal freedom in a money-obsessed culture (adult reading) to my most recent (middle-aged, I’ll reluctantly call it) appreciation of the novel as an artefact of the Gilded Age that lays bare that era’s pathologies.”
Rereading is really working your way through your desert island books. You wouldn’t listen to a favourite Mozart Piano Concerto only once, would you? However, I know people who shy away from this pursuit (“there’s so many great books out there why revisit a novel you already know?”).
I find the second time around, the plot falls into a soft middle distance. I read not to meet the characters and unravel the storyline, but to listen for the emotion and tension behind the words, to recognise the craft of the author, to see how she’s done it, the choices she’s made and the feelings she’s invoked in me. There’s always something new, some marvel I missed last time. Finally to admit that I’m changed and to understand how I’ve changed, and acknowledge that.
And then rereading presents us with the ‘Jennifer Egan principle’ – your age, circumstances, and what’s occurring in the world when you happen to pick up that book. Recently I reread The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. I love all her other books but didn’t get on with this one first time round. How wrong was I! There’s a theme running through it about the tussle of the author to write about himself, or not. Is there anything to say? That resonated with me as it’s a question I’m asking myself now.
I reread The Leopard mostly because it reminds me of my father as it was his favourite. Le Grand Meaulnes got me back into reading in my 20s and I’ve never looked back since. The English Patient is solid five-star pleasure and what’s the harm in that. My desert island book is The Alexandria Quartet. From page 1, I realise how porous I am to Durrell’s writing and his sense of place. He takes me places I am never likely to go.
– Alastair Creamer
I recently picked up a copy of Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock. It’s a book I read long, long ago when I was about 15. A fantasy historical type tome not entirely unlike Games of Thrones and just as whopping, although I had no memory of it being such a chunk of tree. I couldn’t get past about page 20 this time.
I only really reread books of poetry. If I am meeting you for a coffee somewhere you may well turn up to find me reading from Billy Collins’ collection Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes.
Here are a couple of my favourites:
– Paul White
I have just reread The Camomile Lawn, a novel by Mary Wesley, having first read it soon after its publication in 1984. It opens with four young adult cousins who make their annual summer journey to Cornwall to visit their ageing aunt Helena and uncle Richard. This particular summer is 1939 and the country stands on the brink of war. The novel follows the cousins, Helena, Richard and a cast of characters through the war ending up in the early 1980s as the survivors attend the funeral of Max Erstweiler, a wartime Jewish refugee from Austria and a fine musician.
In 1984 I was 26 years old and identified with the cousins. I hoped I had – or could develop – something of Calypso’s tantalising character with even just a hint of her sexual allure. (Fat chance.)
Now, forty years later, Helena, the ageing aunt drew me. Except it turned out that while she was described as someone who was past it, she was actually in her early forties and in her prime!!! (Fat chance of me emulating her too.) Max, who has a roving eye, sees her potential and they become lovers. Helena discovers that sex is not only for the ninety minutes between 22.30 and midnight. Her life takes on a fresh hue.
The whole book heaves with sexual promiscuity and, on occasions, strays into paedophilia. Perhaps prudishly, I decided no-one made a good role model.
Though the lawn came out of it well.
– Hester Thomas
I don’t reread conventional books, as an adult. I used to reread as a child, when I had significantly more free time on my hands, and the concept of a TBR (to be read) did not exist. As an adult, my never-ending TBR glares at me, always asking “why revisit a book you’ve already experienced, when you have over 50 paperbacks and hardbacks on your bookshelf that you want to read, yet haven’t yet? Not to mention over 40 audio books downloaded to your phone via the free month that Audible gave you? Even worse, the over 6 electronic books on your Kindle app on your phone, and the over 70 in your Kindle TBR wish list on Amazon? Why would you be so selfish?”
I listen to my TBR as it has a point, the last books I reread as an adult was the entire Harry Potter series during Christmas break from university in 2011. The only books that I do reread are also the only books that have travelled with me over my life, my brother and I’s collection of over 2000 comic books. I reread them if a decade or more has passed since my last reread, and I would like to enjoy being immersed in their worlds once more. The Batgirl (Cassandra Cain) run that I gravitated to in childhood, made so much more sense to me as I realised I was neurodivergent like Cassandra in adulthood. Cassandra’s mirroring, masking, selective mutism, and childhood trauma; all made me feel like I could be a superhero too.
– Mugabi Byenkya
I don’t reread so much as an adult, but as a child, these were my top rereads (and I still have the copies, apart from the Ladybird book):
- Stranger with My Face, Lois Duncan
- Princess Tales, edited by Nora Kramer
- All Colour Fairy Tales
- The Folk of the Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
- Cinderella, Ladybird books
– Sarah Elliott
I’ve managed to keep a lid on an old leather trunk under the stairs for decades. Too difficult to get to or go through. Now with the need to move my things to another place, I clear boxes away and release the tangled straps, to find musty journals and diaries dating back to the early 70s. Who was that person? Tiny handwriting I need a magnifying glass to decipher. Who, in her first job at a bookshop seemed to spend more time lining up boyfriends than new titles. Who thought she could walk into a job as a copywriter with not a skerrick of experience? Who learned that management stated that women really weren’t hired into ad agencies? I felt as if I was spying or was that prying; reading into a life that was still forming. I’ve packed them away, for a rainy day reread.
– Jane Berney
My top reread is Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin because it’s a gripping insight into lives and times I can only wonder at.
It seems I’m not alone in London in thinking this.
I still also get a thrill from rereading Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole Norwegian crime series. So much detail and atmosphere and great characterisation.
– Lynda Relph-Knight
When I think about the act of rereading, I tend to think of Rebecca Mead’s 2011 New Yorker article “Middlemarch and Me”. In the article (whose topic Mead develops further in her 2014 book My Life in Middlemarch) the writer describes her return, approximately every five years, to the 1871 novel—as a teenager revising for her Oxford entrance exams, as a young adult reconciling her own identity against those of various lovers, and as a married woman. Across every rereading, book and reader shift hand in hand with one another.
I don’t have my own version of Mead’s Middlemarch, but I recently read L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. It is centred on rereading – told from the perspective of Leo Colston, a man in his sixties, as he rediscovers his own boyhood diary from 1900. We reread with him, joining the uninhibited younger Leo as he begins to serve, mercurially, as a messenger between Marian, the daughter of the hall, and her secret lover Ted, a tenant farmer on the Brandham estate. What follows is a quietly magical story which navigates between youth and age, naivety and maturity, and secrecy and openness, all the while revealing the processes of fictionalisation that shape remembrance.
A friend gave me my copy of The Go-Between, and, when I told her I had finished it, said, ‘I should reread that’. I think I will, too.
– Chloe Green
This month’s project had been gestating for a little while. First of all I had had a conversation with someone reading Rebecca Mead’s book on Middlemarch mentioned above (which had inspired me to read Eliot’s book), and then I fell into conversations with various members of my family – with my grandma about Middlemarch, War and Peace, and Henry James’ Parade’s End, and with my mum about Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible.
She had read the book just after my elder brother was born and, as a new mother with a premature, vulnerable baby, she had been entirely absorbed in the character of the wife – forced to bring four daughters to the Congo in 1959 as her missionary husband fought his own personal battle with God. She was thinking of her mother, who (though Croydon was rather less threatening a prospect than the Congo!), had given up her own life to move to a new city with her young children to support her husband’s work. She was thinking of herself – what would you do, newborn in arms? What sacrifices would and should you make? How, just forty years before, could anyone be given such little agency in these life-defining choices?
Rereading the book another twenty-five years on – with adult children, and having discovered the very similar story of her great-grandfather (a missionary who had died of a tropical disease leaving a wife and small child) – her perspective had changed. As well as focussing more on the writing, she discovered that she had almost entirely ignored the second half of the book: the children reaching adulthood and each learning to live with and move on from their past. It had clearly failed to strike a chord the first time around, but now, with two adult children (each treading a very different path to the other), those journeys and choices became the centre of the whole text.
My thoughts on rereading are few. I haven’t got there yet. I haven’t lived enough, I haven’t earned it. I might notice an extra character arc, a few more exquisite turns of phrase, but there’s no paradigm shift – I’m still essentially the same reader reading the same text. The only comparable experience I might have would be reading Harry Potter or Where the Wild Things Are to a child up the road. And even that is more nostalgia than revelation.
The later chapters of Poisonwood Bible tell of the mother living out her later years peacefully tending a garden back in the US. Maybe we can read it together in a decade’s time.
– Max Parfitt