Hello, Old Friend, Time to Read You Again On the fresh pleasures and insights that can come from revisiting a favorite book. By Christopher B. Nelson
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hello-old-friend-time-to-read-you-again-1450221671
As Christmas approaches, many Americans are making their holiday reading lists—and their plans to cozy up over a long vacation with the year’s hot books or their piles of unopened magazines. But it’s important, too, to think about the value of rereading favorite works: Robert Frost’s poems, perhaps, or George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”
We do a lot of rereading at my college. Students are instructed to reread assignments once or twice before going to class, and professors in faculty study groups must reread books from the college’s core list.
Yet some regard rereading as a guilty pleasure. After all, new books come out all the time. “With the shelves thus groaning,” Hephzibah Anderson wrote last year for the BBC, “pulling down a well-thumbed favourite feels like an unconscionable indulgence.”
Surely we shouldn’t give in to this feeling. There may have been a time when so few books had been published that one could read everything. But that was several centuries ago. It doesn’t make much sense to feel guilty for failing to attain an impossible goal.
Rushing from one book to the next seems disrespectful to me, I suppose because I’ve always thought of my favorite books as friends. They need and deserve to be lingered with, to be listened to. The books that teach us the most, that take us out of ourselves, that console us in difficult times—those books deserve better than to be set aside just because an attractive new cover passes by.
Moreover, a first reading of a book is always a pressured reading. Even if it’s only the latest potboiler, you don’t know the landscape the first time through. You’re on the edge of your seat trying to see what’s coming. When rereading, you already know the big picture and can pay close attention to the details. You notice things that you missed the first time. Your imagination gets a workout, judging whether it was adequate to the book on the first pass, or whether you need to revise your previous images.
One of the things we discover as we mature is that the familiar is really quite unfamiliar, if observed attentively. Over 30 years ago, Annie Dillard published a book called “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” in which she recounts all sorts of surprising things about everyday objects. “I could see the shape of the land,” she writes, admiring a country landscape of fences and pastures, “how it lay holding silence.”
So too, the most familiar books reveal more about themselves when we attend to them anew. And our growing experience allows us to approach our favorites from different angles. In a sense, rereading the same book produces new insights because the reader is a different person. Indeed, a good book is very much like a mirror: The glass is the same year after year, but the reflection in it changes over time.
Don’t pay any attention if your conscience tries to make you feel guilty for taking the time to reread a favorite book this winter. It is more fruitful and satisfying to read one good book well than a thousand poorly. And the best books cannot be read well without rereading.
Mr. Nelson is the president of St. John’s College, a liberal arts school with campuses in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M.
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