Are you a re-reader?

[Cooper77]

This question seems to divide the room. Some love to re-read, others say it's a waste of time, since there are so many books out there and life is so short.

Personally, I'm very much in the re-read camp. In a lecture on Dickens, Nabokov said that you must "surrender to Dickens' voice," and I think that's the key. All the writers I re-read have a distinctive and comforting voice. When I pick up P. G. Wodehouse, for example, or Douglas Adams, it is unmistakably them. Same goes for my other favourite writers– Aldous Huxley, Anita Brookner, Bertrand Russell, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf, etc. In many ways, re-reading them is as comforting as meeting up with a beloved friend.

I also read out loud. I suspect I developed the habit because I wanted to bring the author's voice alive. When you think about it, a book really is a kind of miracle. It's as if the soul or mind or consciousness (or whatever word you choose) of that dead author is in the room with you –especially when you read them out loud. One of my favourite books is Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts. But I don't read it for the content. I read it for the pleasure of his company. I've re-read that book so many times now it's like I know him.

Absolutely! Some books are like old friends, to revisit after a few years,and find something new in them. I never get rid of books (apart from the odd paperback which turned out disappointing), my shelves just grow longer!

Yes because I am a very fast reader - usually my first "pass" is enough to get the broad outlines of a book. I will then determine if I think it's worth rereading, or even multiple times, gaining something new each time. Sometimes years between and something else I've read in the interim informs and enriches my re-reading.

The classic for me at the moment is I read David Copperfield as a teen, listened to it as an audiobook in lockdown, read Demon Copperhead this year, and I'm sure I will re-read David Copperfield as a result at some point in the future with the pleasure of spotting how and why Barbara Kingsolver chose to write her book the way she did.

absolutely. most of my books have been read and re-read at least every couple of years or so.

The one's that don't pass muster tend to get donated/re-gifted.

Agree with you op.....re reading an old book is like discovering an old friend to me. I have original copies of watership down from my childhood (45 years old) but I still love reading them. Original copies of Stephen king's early stuff too

I re read my favourite bits, more than whole books nowadays

I'll say, there are some books I know pretty much off by heart, that doesn't stop me reading them over and over. They were my lifeline during first lockdown - WFH was a nightmare and I didn'd want anything complicated or new when I did pick a book up.

Yes, very much so!

Oh yes, I'm definitely a re-reader!

I find it very hard to let go of some of my books for that reason

I still have books from my childhood that I enjoy reading and I have my DM's copy of Rebecca which I've read many times

I collect Persephone books and always enjoy re-reading them

My favourites are 'books about books' . . . I love re-reading these and they often remind me of a book I read years ago which I then want to re-read

Yes, same here. I rarely re-read a book from cover to cover. I dip in and re-read favourite passages. I love David Copperfield, for example, but not every page. Dickens has his faults, and even his best works are patchy. I love Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, but I can do without the ten page description of Prague’s architecture.

Absolutely. I enjoy finding new things to reflect on and as I get older finding how my perspective sometimes has shifted from my last read.

I'm an enthusiastic re reader, I think it stems from when I was young and poor and only had a few books, but I HAD to read something!

I've got a few long series that I reread, usually late at night, including Wolf Hall trilogy, Shardlake series, Aubrey/Maturin series. Reading them is like having a cup of tea with an old friend.
Then there is another group, read for the beauty of the language and how the characters can still surprise me, books such as A Room With A View, Brideshead Revisited, Mrs Dalloway etc.

I'm a huge Patrick Leigh Fermor fan too, though I was disappointed by Artemis Cooper's biography.

If you've not already read it, Ill Met By Moonlight by W. Stanley Moss, is an interesting book, the story of the kidnapping of a German General on Crete in WWII, by a group including PLF and Greek partisans. It's a real Boys Own adventure story.

Yes, not as much I did in my teens, but there are a few books I will always have on my shelf

Absolutely. It’s a different kind of pleasure to reading something new, but a compelling (and reliable) one. The greatest compliment I can pay anything I’m reading for the first time is to find myself thinking ‘I’ll enjoy rereading this’.

Yes, beauty of language is another reason for re-reading. I suppose my attitude to authors is similar to my attitude to friends. We really do have a similar relationship with them. Just as I have certain friends I turn to when I need a laugh, and others I turn to for advice, so I have certain writers I turn to for beauty, and others for wisdom or comfort. If I crave beauty, I read Philip Larkin, T. S. Eliot and Anthony Burgess. All of them use language in ways that thrill and move me. But I wouldn’t turn to them for comfort. Larkin certainly doesn’t cheer me up, nor does he offer much wisdom or guidance! P G Wodehouse’s books are funny, joyful and beautiful, but not intellectually stimulating. If I want interesting ideas, I turn to Aldous Huxley.

Yes! And there are even a few books that I've read loads of times, yet I still feel like turning back to page one and starting again as soon as I've finished them!

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.

There are only a couple of books out of many thousands that I have read more than once. It's why I'm trying to get rid of all my books.

So glad it's not just me reading a bit of a favourite and not the whole thing.

Absolutely a rereader. Of Dickens especially. Obviously of Jane - usually an annual canter through them all, especially if I'm slightly unwell. I'm also a fan of Paddy Leigh Fermor so yes to that. Harold Nicolson diaries, oddly, because I'm interested in the voice of the times. Anything that's too dense for single read, 'Middlemarch', for instance, or 'Portrait of a Lady.' Plugging through Proust for about the third time at the moment. Still not really getting it though there are glimmers..

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 constantly re-read - to my detriment. I end up reading fewer books overall!

I think it may have been Susan Sontag who said something like, No book is worth reading unless it's worth reading several times. Except I'm sure she said it better than that.

I do this. Yy to all of Austen when I am unwell! Robertson Davies is one of my most read authors. I don't always read all of an author obsessively though, the only Steinbeck I read again is East of Eden.

There were different books I read over and over in my teens that I haven't revisited for thirty years - I have just discovered an audible version of The Mists of Avalon by M Z Bradley and listening to it has brought my teenage years into focus as well as the story.

I am always so grateful that writers write books. My life has been so rich because of it and it is not something I could ever do. I agree with the pp that books are miracles.

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.

Definitely! Sometimes for comfort, sometimes because I want to revisit and see how clues fit together, sometimes because it’s just a really good story/writing.

I had an odd experience once in that I spent six months in a small wooden cabin in a Himalayan village, not electricity or plumbing and nobody spoke more than a few words of English. No other Westerners and the nineties, so no internet. I had only a few books with me and one was Our Mutual Friend. I just read it and when I finished I waited for a bit, then started it again. Seem to remember I was alternating it with Evelyn Waugh 'Put Out More Flags.' Probably read it 4 time at least.

Anyway, I read every night by the light of a single Chinese candle that used to fizz and pop and occasionally go out completely, darkness profound, strange night noises, a very singular environment. I became so familiar with the book that I used occasionally to have semi hallucinatory experience and catch whiffs of the tar and foetid mud of the Thames at Wapping Reach, or the spring vegetation of an English Lane (Himalayan spring vegetation smells completely different!) Once or twice I even felt the characters, or it might have been the author, not clear on that, were behind me looking over my shoulder, and I'd turn quickly, spooked.

I've reread it since with pleasure, but without the intensity.
I did wonder whether, in the past, in the days of fewer books and candlelight, readers did experience a more immersive experience, as I did then.
It's a very good book (luckily).