There isn’t a doubt that reading is good for you.

Yet although we may be readers, how many of us are re-readers?

One of the main reasons for our aversion to rereading books is most obvious (and perhaps superficial?): Time. Easy enough as children or young adults to indulge in rereading binges over long vacations, but now, juggling job, family, household, seems to leave little or no opportunity to do the same. Our ‘To-Read’ lists may stretch from here to China. Unread books pile up on bedside tables, constantly replenished by visits to bookshops and book fairs, a fabulous online sale, or generous friends. We may be traumatised by the notion that we won’t have time to read all the books we want to before we die. (I am; it’s a horrible thought.) We flit from new author to new author, new book to new book, voracious butterflies, constantly seeking fresh literary adventures. Nothing quite beats that first-time experience — the thrill of seeing whole new arrangements of words on a page, of following characters not knowing what the next chapter holds for them, the absolute delight of coming across an exquisite paragraph or phrase or idea.

Having said this, though, in all honesty there have been times that I’ve tried. Yet picking up JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye years after first reading it in college, left me feeling oddly less moved. As did Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby . The problem, I think, with rereading is that it reminds us of where we’ve been and where we cannot go again. Some doors have closed. They were meant to be walked through once, and once only. But is that always true? Unconvinced, I sought out the rereaders among us.

Susan Hill, author of the marvellously spine-chilling Woman in Black has written a book about it. Howards End is on the Landing documents a year-long voyage through her library in order to get to know her own (vast) collection again. “I wanted to repossess my books,” she writes, “to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading…” Apart from “repossession” she also mentions — in her rereadings of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Dickens — a noticeable deepening of understanding. Possibly why Nabokov was prompted to say (in Lectures on Literature ) that “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.”

When we read for the first time, we are occupied by plot and character and structure. And the very process of learning, in terms of time and space, what the book is about, stands between us and artistic appreciation. Nabokov goes on to say that “[t]he element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.” Yet is a reread (or several if you’re Nabokov) an opportunity only for us to gather a text’s subterranean meanings?

For some, rereads are essential to reveal craft. To see a book, as Sarah Seltzer, editor of Flavorwire, says, as a “false creation”.

Rereads are the space within which you may dwell not only on the fictional characters but on the author herself — how she accomplished her tone, what her personal and literary sources were. Perhaps the miracle (with a good book) is that despite seeing the strings being pulled from behind the scenes, you still enjoy the show.

For a friend, who reads Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird every spring, the act is one of establishing a sense of certainty. Amidst all the changes a year can bring, the book becomes a still, comforting centre. It serves, he says, as a reminder of his first encounter with the novel, which was a good, happy time. The reason, though, that I might make 2016 my year of rereading is that it’s also an act of reassessment of oneself. Of one’s growth as a reader, and person. Of one’s loss of innocence. Rebecca Mead, for example, writer at The New Yorker , first encountered George Eliot’s Middlemarch at 17. Since then, she has reread it every five years, “[her] emotional response to it evolving at each revisiting.” In each chapter of her own life — leaving home, moving to America, becoming a mother — it has resonated differently. She has found herself being drawn to different characters, of growing to understand some she didn’t quite empathise with in the past. As author Hephzibah Anderson wrote in “Rereading: The Ultimate Guilty Pleasure?” for the BBC, “though the words on the page stay the same, our readings of them change.” We come to a book we’ve already read with the weight of all the experiences we’ve had since, and all the other books we’ve thence encountered. We review them as much as they review us. Rereadings reveal old selves, and new.

(Janice Pariat is the author of Seahorse)

@janicepariat

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