In her new book, On Rereading, Patricia Meyer Spacks presents the results of her year-long experiment in rereading, undertaken in an attempt to understand what pleasure we gain from indulging in familiar books. Spacks, a past President of The Academy of Arts & Sciences and a National Book Award finalist, was interested in exploring how the particular joys of rereading old books can outweigh the faint guilt that attends the avoidance of all of those new and classic titles we’ve yet to read even once. She learned that the experience of rereading is intensely personal, an occasion to revisit one’s former self or selves, to balance familiar feelings with new realizations:
The dynamic tension between stability and change lies at the heart of rereading. Every renewed exchange between book and reader contains elements of both, and both provide pleasure. Our psychic needs vary, and reread books answer different needs at different times. Seeking solace, we return to a treasured children’s book. A beloved piece of light fiction answers our yearning for pure recreation. We find excitement in a rousing plot even though we already know how it will turn out; we contemplate our past as we reread something first encountered in adolescence.
On Rereading is an intensely personal book that has made many of us here at HUP consider our own rereading experiences and habits. When we sat down to record Spacks talking about the book, we couldn’t resist adding in some thoughts of our own. Take a look:
We’ve also been thinking about the rereading experiences of booksellers. They’re surrounded by books all day, the familiar old titles and the never-ending stream of exciting new ones that it’s their job to digest on behalf of the rest of us. If anyone should know the faint guilt of rereading, it’s booksellers. Do they even try to reread? HUP Sales Rep John Eklund, who wrote earlier this year about rereading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, polled a few booksellers about whether they’ve had memorable experiences rereading.
Here’s Conrad Silverberg of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company:
I first read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy in 1985 and, of course, fell in love with his elevated, almost biblical prose and complex yet readable writing style. I was, however, utterly in ignorance about anything else about the book (its historical setting or the real people he fictionalized). Now, some twenty-six years later, I am better informed (having read Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen, The War of a Thousand Deserts by Brian Delay and Empire of the Summer Moon by SC Gwynne) and can safely say that, sometimes you really do not need to be well-informed to love a book. I am loving it again for the same reasons I did the last time.
And here’s Mark Paprocki, also of Boswell Book Company:
In high school The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was required reading. I was 15 at the time and I hated the book. The phonetic Missouri dialect was torturous. Was it supposed to be cute? Quaint? Maybe it was charming back in 1885, but in the modern, sophisticated 1980s it was a crashing bore! At that age all I wanted to read about was aliens in distant galaxies or cloak & dagger spy novels. Years later I reread Huck Finn more or less on a whim. Probably due to the incessant controversy around the book’s use of the N-word. At that point the dialect posed no problem—I had since read A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and if you can get through the dialogue in that book, then you can take on just about anything. Needless to say, I was captivated by Huck Finn. There are life lessons, laugh out loud humor, adventure, and just flat out good story telling. It is now one of my favorite books, a desert-island must-have. I think you only really appreciate childhood from the vantage point of a mature adult. Mark Twain understood that. Thank you Mr. Twain.
And Hans Weyandt, from Micawber’s Books in St. Paul:
When I was younger I reread with regularity. Passages, chapters, whole books that were read once a year or a portion at the beginning of baseball season. Now, with the exception of poetry, I only will glance back at excerpts. There is so much I need to read. Piles of things I must read. Classics I have not read. Despite that (negative) pressure I still take time to read pieces of Joseph Mitchell’s great and timeless Up in The Old Hotel as often as I catch a glimpse of it on my shelves. Over time certain sections have changed meaning for me. Some have gotten stronger and some less so. I see more of his humor that I couldn’t understand in my early twenties. I read again about Joe Gould and his epic struggle to create great art. Mostly I read Mitchell because he calms me with his prose and his tales of both the epic characters of his times and the normal people populating old New York. Every time I’ve had a chance to step into McSorley’s I think of Mr. Mitchell and his wonderful words.
But, of course, rereading’s not for everyone. John asked Michael Boggs of Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, KY, whether he rereads. His reply: “Well, no. To quote Mick Jagger, ‘who wants yesterday’s papers, who wants yesterday’s girl?’”
Lots of us! And On Rereading is a great excuse to think about why.
