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.

I’m not a re-reader but there are some seminal texts I read in my teens that I probably didn’t fully understand or appreciate at the time.

Yes, absolutely! I have a lot of books that are old friends and that I re read constantly (no novels - I don’t read fiction) and some that come out occasionally for a little look, and if I don’t like a book on first go, it likely will be abandoned quickly and passed on to charity.

Why no fiction, @Catnipcupcakes ?

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.

I'm not generally. I read a lot and I read very very quickly. But authors I come back to again and again to reread are Jane Austen particularly Persuasion, Barbara Pym and Richmal Crompton particularly Narcissa and Caroline. Quite a random one but I find The Ravensworth Scholarship by Mrs Henry Clark (old schoolgirl story) a real comfort read, though the heroine goes through a very stressful time.

And anything by Mrs Henry Wood/ Ellen Wood and Wilkie Collins. I can read those authors again and again.

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.

I do re-read. I read so many great works of literature when I was young, but I'm naturally quite naiive and when I realised this I did start going back over so many books. I've also found that different ages offer up different perspectives and that brings a new richness to a familiar story.

Yes, the whole thing always. I am definitely a start at the start and go through all the way to the end reader, though I will abandon a book after a few pages if it's not doing it for me. I can't imagine just dipping in. That feels completely wrong.

Yes, very much so. Some books, once I finish them, I'll go straight back to the start and read them again. Nancy Turner's 'These is my Words' was like that and I lent it to a friend who said she read it four times back to back. It's true about hearing the book's voice too and that's a large part of what draws me back. In the book above, I could hear Sarah Prine's voice right from the start. I loved that woman and wanted her to be real so we could be friends.

I don't get why anyone would consider re-reading an odd thing. Would you only listen to a piece of music once? Re-reading lets you get right into the marrow of the story and you find bits you missed the first time, or the mood you're in will change how you see parts of the story.

Can't remember who it was now, but someone said 'Books are our silent friends' and it's true.

“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.”
― Charles W. Eliot

Lovely.

Yes. I buy lots of books, but always in the expectation that each one will be read at least 2 or 3 times.

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.

You have described my attitude to books perfectly too 👌.

Hell yes