On Rereading [Kindle Edition]

Those of us who read extensively are also apt to be rereaders. There are a number of writers out there who have written on the experience of reading. The number of writers who have tackled rereading, however, is much smaller. For that alone, this book is a worthwhile endeavor. The fact that it is also a pleasurable read is a bonus.

To be honest, though Professor Spacks is trying to analyze the experience of rereading, this is not what makes the book most engaging. It is the simple encounter with what she has read and what she considers worth rereading. She enjoys Alice in Wonderland. I've never liked it much and recently tried reading it aloud to my daughter over a couple weeks but stalled out around chapter 8. She can't make it through The Chronicles of Narnia again, whereas I have read them through more times than I can count. She and I agree that The Catcher in the Rye is not a very good novel. She has a passion for Austen; I have a passion for Dickens.

And, again, despite the topic here, it is interesting to read through her analyses of various books that I have never read. She has the advantage of having spent a career in literature extending back into the 1950's, so it's no surprise that her reading list is much more extensive than mine. But she doesn't hang it over the head of her reader. She also acknowledges that, as a teacher of literature, some of her rereading is done professionally, and this impacts her interpretations.

Any complaints I have about what I encountered here are small, and mostly matters of argument it would likely be interesting to take up with Professor Spacks, if we ever have the chance to speak. I, for example, am not a believer in the category of "guilty pleasures" and I certainly would not included Wodehouse as an author that deserves that appellation even if I were. I also feel warmer towards the concept of "reading together" than she seems to be, if for no other reason than that I often find the pleasure of book discussions to be a great as that of reading itself (which is one of the main reasons this book itself is so pleasurable--the conversation I am able to carry on with the author about these books). On the other hand, I was right with her on the concept of "books I ought to like". There are plenty of things people tell me I should love to read that do nothing for me.

As to the main theme of the book: Professor Spacks seems to come to one main conclusion that stands out in my memory. Unless we are a professional, we reread to relive a previous pleasure. The previous experience of reading pleasure leads us to the expectation of a repeated pleasure by rereading. Of course, each time we reread, we are different and so our experience of even a well-known book is different. This can be good, if the book still speaks to the person we are, but can be a disappointment if we can no longer find meaning in what we once did. Both experiences are familiar to the rereader. We can find new depths in some books but we can also be left wondering what it was that attracted us to a book in the first place.

At this point in my life, and on this first read, I feel that Professor Spacks has written a book of great depth and interest. As time goes on, I hope to be even more widely read than I am now. That gives me hope that if I ever decide to dip into this book again, it will reveal even more to me. Only time will tell.

Written by an English professor, published by Harvard University Press, I was uncertain whether this book was addressed to other academics, or actual readers. I need not have worried. This is an extremely interesting analysis and meditation on the question of why people reread novels. The simple answer is to relive the pleasure experienced when the book was first read, but the author isn't satisfied with that obvious answer and spends the 280 page book experimenting with various type of rereading in her own life, exploring the results. She is forthright in explaining that this is merely the explanation for her own personal experience of rereading, and humble is asking us not to follow her literary pleasures. "I urge that rereaders, rather, note and value their own forms of pleasure as they engage and re-engage their favorite books." And at least for this reader, she has provided exactly that prompt to examine my own rereading.

The book starts by immersing us in the world of early childhood reading. While few of us will remember the books that were read to us as young children, as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles we remember the "need" children have to be read the same books over and over without changing words or even inflections. It is a primal soothing experienced by the child, to know that whatever else may change, the comfort, the pleasure, in hearing these stories repeated remains a predictable source of pleasure. After persuasively reemerging the reader in this childhood pleasure she describes her own childhood reading (she read at 3, went to college at 15...yeah, one of those). The childhood book from her own life that she examines is Alice in Wonderland, remembering why is was important to her as a child and why as an adult preparing this book she still found it a well written and technically successful novel.

The pattern of introducing a category of rereading followed by her personal experience with that category is repeated throughout the book. I found it generally very successful. The categories of rereading that she explores are books she originally read as a child, during specific decades (1950s through 1970s), books read for pleasure, professionally, books she didn't like the first time but feels compelled to give them another chance, guilty pleasures, books read with others and Jane Austin. She refreshingly makes it clear that these are arbitrary categories, simply ones that seemed relevant divisions in her own personal exploration of rereading. But at least for this reader, they were immensely thought provoking categories and explorations, particularly because she approached the whole rereading enterprise as a fascinating puzzle, one for which she lacked the solution, inviting the reader to join in the exploration. Since starting the book, every conversation with a friend, my local librarian, an usher at the symphony, I ask...what books have you reread the most, and why? Every single person admitted they lacked a ready answer to this question, but all were intrigued by it and said they would give it some thought.

The author explains the trajectory of her reading life from a young voracious reader munching her way indiscriminately through the local library, college and graduate school in English reading what was required to get a doctorate, a young academic feeling her way as a professional (oddly she rarely talks about reading and rereading as something she taught to others) and later as a professor repeatedly teaching and reading the same texts. Into that background she places the various categories of her reading, for example taking books from three decades that she found important, and pleasurable, at the time and giving us her impressions when she rereads them. The books selected for this exercise are Catcher in the Rye, Lucky Jim, The Golden Notebook and The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. In each case she read the book when it was published. I also have read all of these, but except for the Murdoch, not when published, and except for Lucky Jim, none of them was ever on my most popular list. The author first describes why the particular book was important to her originally, and why most of the books no longer hold her interest. Much of the answer is that her pleasure the first time was in the interplay between herself and society when she encountered the book. The book spoke to her at a particular time in her life, it resonated and provided an interplay with her life. Decades later on rereading them this interplay is long-gone, leaving each books to stand on its intrinsic value. It is understandable that they fail to resonate on rereading. The exception is The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, which she still finds a successful novel.

There is a refreshing chapter on the pleasure of rereading and a discussion of reading for pleasure versus reading professionally. "The professional rereader constantly assesses what she discovers. The recreational reader can simply embrace it." She describes well the joys of the later, but the former is portrayed using language that makes it hard for me to imagine why someone would ever want to spend their professional career as an academic in the field of English literature. One quote I found so very sad was "literature department...faculty members rarely talk with one another about books." My experience with literature classes (as an undergraduate) was a silly game of determining how many hidden things you could discover about the novel. I saw this as a combination of the old how-may-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin absurdity combined with an unrelenting demand that one analyze rather than enjoy. Yes, rather. The same dichotomy is described in the author's description of reading professionally versus for pleasure.

There is an evocative chapter on guilty pleasures, though Wodehouse and Arnold Bennett could only be considered "guilty" by an English professor. My personal guilty pleasure is Rex Stout. Meeting her criteria of books that sooth, I always carry a few Stouts on my Kindle, and an audio version of another on my iPod, because you never really know when you'll need it!

With the exception of Rex Stout, the only books I have read more than twice are War & Peace and Moby Dick, each of which I have read maybe half a dozen times. The list of those I've read twice but look forward to rereading again (and again) is longer, with Trollope's Barchester series and Proust's Remembrance of Thing's Past at the top of the list. When I retired I spent much of my first year in retirement rereading books with high pleasure memories. Huge swathes of Dostoevsky, Trollope and Balzac. After that binge I returned to books not previously read, and since then have rationed my rereading for the familiar reason that there are so many books I haven't read, what is my justification for rereading. This books is a reminder of the pleasure and rewards of rereading. Thank you Ms. Spacks.

There is a YouTube video on this book produced by her publisher that I recommend. It intersperses the author's charming discussion of rereading with people connected to Harvard University Press discussing their own rereading experiences. And lastly, on the off-chance that the author reads this, I feel compelled to gently inform the author that not everyone loves, or even likes, Jane Austin. Unless Pride and Prejudice and Zombies counts.

It's hard to improve on Doris Lessing, in her preface to The (much maligned, by Spacks) Golden Notebook: 'the book that bores you when you are twenty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vice versa'. With years we don't know better, we know different, though with years we're pickier; and of course a dumb book never improves. Leslie Fiedler, in gnomic mode: 'each book worth rereading, reread is new again.. It is with those that we pick up for the first time that we have the most trouble'. The trouble is that many of the books Spacks picks up are not worth rereading

This book seems to me to exude a peculiarly female kind of self-centredness antithetical to the sort of rigour (or speculation) I personally prefer. (Not that women can't do that too - Maggie Nelson's splendid Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions a recent case in point - and rigour naturally in no wise precludes sensibility (Sontag, Ozick, Garber, Atwood?) while men also write the more self-indulgent personalized kind of book, but it's usually of the 'setting the world to rights' variety; if it's strictly all-about-me, they generally turn religious. Broadly - men: what's it all for? women: what am I for? both sexes: what am I like!!

Is the message Reading Can Be Good For You or Honestly, it can be Fun, Fun, Fun? Most of this would be sorry stuff even as journalism - Spacks even tots up the Amazon reviews in hopes of enlightenment - and the idea that reading seriously (attentively, critically) requires a conscious choice I find extraordinary in a teacher. The progressive retrenchment of the educated élite in the West is dispiriting to behold. Thank goodness your avant garde thrives! Actually, the message is more 'Aren't I getting on?' and 'Isn't it funny how we change our minds?', even 'Doesn't memory play strange tricks?' Clichéd clodhopping. And frankly, my dear, the reviews I've seen, in the THES and the TLS, have been - in a word - astonishing