Are you a re-reader?

I think the main argument against re-reading is that there are so many books and so little time. Even reading the whole of Austen and Dickens would take several years, when you add in work, relationships, socialising, and so on. This is why I turn to critics like Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode. Since there is so little time, I need guidance to what is best.

Some make the case (not sure I agree, but you can make the case) that instead of reading widely we should aim to read deeply. In other words, the vast majority of books aren’t worth reading. It’s not that they’re bad, just that others have done it better. Why read Hemingway’s war stories, for example, when you can read The Iliad and War and Peace, both of which tackle war more deeply and profoundly than Hemingway ever could. Instead, we ought to focus on the 100 or so truly great works, and just read and re-read them, sinking ever deeper each time.

Do you re-read the entire book? This also seems to divide the room. Some like to re-read from cover to cover, others prefer to dip in and out. I’m a dipper. I mark favourite chapters and paragraphs and then re-read them (often out loud). The only books I have re-read from cover to cover are Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Wodehouse’s Joy in the Springtime.

There are books I want to re-read slowly and carefully. I just don’t get the time. I would definitely like to re-read Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything and also Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker series. He’s full of such interesting ideas.

This is such an interesting post, thank you. I totally agree.

People used to have a far more intense relationships with books. They were treasured and revered. It’s hard for us to appreciate this, of course, living as we do in a world of TVs and IPods and desktops. Imagine a different world, however - one far quieter and emptier, where the only entertainment was the handful of books on your shelves.

We’ve also lost the habit of reading out loud. People used to read aloud to one another all the time (and presumably to themselves). I do this a lot, and I swear there is something therapeutic and healing about it. I urge anyone reading this post to try it for themselves. Next time you feel sad or lost, pile up your favourite books and read them out loud. You might feel a bit silly or self-conscious at first, but it passes. Doesn’t matter what the book is. It could be The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe or Sherlock Holmes. I swear by P G Wodehouse. He’s better than Prozac.

In Ancient Greece, words were thought to be powerful, even dangerous; and in many cultures poetry was thought indistinguishable from magic. When you stop and think what book is, it’s incredible. A book not only captures a long dead mind, but it captures that mind at the very limit of what it can think and express. Hamlet, for example, or Bleak House, give us not just Shakespeare and Dickens, but Shakespeare and Dickens at the height of their powers.

I have often fantasied about doing what you describe. I mean isolating myself with a great work and doing nothing but reading it out loud, memorising long passages, and absorbing it into my bones. It would be like downloading the author’s mind. What you describe doesn’t sound odd to me at all. If I locked myself away in a cottage by the sea, and did nothing all day but read, say, William Blake or Oscar Wilde, I’m sure I’d start hallucinating. And also having some pretty weird dreams.

It amazes me how such authors stand the test of time. There is something so moving about reading a classic like Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights and knowing that so many people before you, in different cultures and places, have read exactly the same words. Patrick Fermor, for example, said he read and re-read David Copperfield while fighting behind enemy lines in Crete in WW2. And I remember an American POW saying he read a battered old copy of Jane Eyre while imprisoned in a bamboo hut in Vietnam.

It’s also striking the way certain writers appeal to certain types of people in certain types of situations. Why do so many find Jane Austen a comfort when they’re ill? Apparently, P G Wodehouse has always been exceptionally popular is psychiatric hospitals. He used to make a joke about this, but deep down he knew that there was something soothing and healing about his language. Think how many writers there have been over the last 250 years. And how many books. Yet time and again people reach for the same handful of great works. It’s so moving to think what authors like that achieved. Long after they died they’re still comforting people.

I always make a point of saying to non-readers that I don’t just read for entertainment. If I just wanted entertainment, I’d play video games and watch The Simpsons. I read for wisdom, guidance and support. Great books heal you at some deep, emotional level. James Joyce said once that Shakespeare’s plays are a solace for “all those whose minds have lost their balance.” But that’s true of great literature in general. Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, or any other writer who moves you, can re-balance your mind. Joyce nails it perfectly.

I could say the same, word for word, about Proust. I was ploughing through volume one in French (dictionary by my side) until life, as always, got in the way.

Funny you should say you re-read Austen when unwell. I heard Stig Abell, the editor of the TLS, say he’d re-read Pride and Prejudice at least 100 times, and that when he had Covid it was the first thing he reached for. And Martin Amis said that no matter how many times he re-read P&P he always felt the same joy at Lizzie and Darcy’s marriage. It’s magic I tells ya, magic.

I said in an earlier post that I re-read because I love the voice of a particular author. When I pick up Patrick Fermor’s Time of Gifts, for example, or a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell or Douglas Adams, their voice is unmistakable. But there are also fictional voices I love. I love Bertie Wooster’s sweet, cheerful, self-mocking voice, for example. He narrates the Jeeves and Wooster novels, so in theory it is his voice we’re hearing, not Wodehouse’s. Harold Bloom said that the greatest characters escape their author and establish a life of their own. This is especially true (according to Bloom) of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Proust and a handful of others.