The rereading habits of the TLS staff

By Rozalind Dineen

In this week’s TLS, Bharat Tandon reviews two books on the subject of rereading. That’s right, rereading; as if the pile of books that we would like a chance to read even once isn’t large enough. 

But rereading, as Tandon reminds us, can be one of life’s particularly rich experiences: it is where the narratives of novels and the narratives of our own lives “can converge meaningfully”.  When we reread we remember where we were the first time, who we were and how we were. We realize how we reacted differently to a text when we were younger, or sicker, or holidaying or studying. “We may try to be semioticians . . . but autobiography is always breaking in.”

An office survey is one way to pass a Friday afternoon. So, do the TLS staff reread?

Some said no, only children and academics really reread. Others emerged as constant returners to favourite texts: Stalky & Co. by Rudyard Kipling, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Poems are perfect for the rereader, book-length ones for the truly dedicated; “Madoc: A mystery” by Paul Muldoon and “The Oval Window” by J. H. Prynne were both mentioned. Graham Greene gets revisited, Money has been too. Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved was the only book available to one staff member in a far off hotel on a rainy day, it turned out to seem more relevant and far more detailed the second time around.

One editor returned to a book he loved, Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, only to find it desperately disappointing. “It taught me not to go back to books I'd loved.” Another said she went back to D. H. Lawrence after a teenage infatuation, “and discovered that I hadn’t really ‘got’ it at all. The fourteen-year-old me had completely missed any hints of sadism, sexism or machismo – not to mention all that business about the yellow catkins, long danglers and little red flames.”

Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo's Child, Stick Man, Tiddler, The Highway Rat, Tabby McTat and Zog all came up, having been read and read and reread once more (“but only once more and then lights out”) as bedtime stories. Asterix and The Wind in the Willows also featured, the TLS’s first reading of which was brilliantly wrong-headed (October  22, 1908): “The chief character is a mole, whom the reader plumps upon on the first page whitewashing his house. Here is an initial nut to crack; a mole whitewashing. No doubt moles like their abodes to be clean; but whitewashing? Are we very stupid? . . . However, let it pass . . . . We meet also a variety of animals whose foibles doubtless are borrowed from mankind, and so the book goes on until the end . . . . as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible.”

Some TLS editors read all the books that they review twice. Perhaps this anonymous reviewer of Kenneth Grahame did not. Or maybe he reread later in life and quietly changed his mind.

As rereading (just like its parent, reading) is an appetite that can never be satisfied, the follow-on question had to be, what would you reread in an ideal world? Proust, Dostoevsky, Jeffrey Archer. “Everything by William Gaddis, Underworld by Don DeLillo, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Márquez (if I had some years of solitude in which to do so ho ho ho)”.

We welcome your rereading anecdotes below. It’s a way to pass a Friday afternoon.

 

Comments

[Diana Gilliland Wright]

For fiction: I've just started in on Baudolino for the 5th time (2 of them in Italian). I've read Wittgenstein's Mistress three time. Henry James' Secret Agent, Golden Bowl, & Spoils of Poynton 4 times each. Lost count on Jane Austen and Sir Thomas Browne. 5 for Tristram Shandy.

I read the scholarly books I review at least twice, but if the research aspects are sometimes pleasurable, I rarely see language that is.

[A rereader]

I'm currently rereading An Interrupted Life: the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43. My first reading was last weekend, when I picked up the book at a friend's house by "chance". Once was not enough. Now that my friend's replacement copy is on the way to me in the post, I'm free to reread it and mark the juiciest bits which I want to always be able to refer back to. I had a similar experience with Brian Keenan's An Evil Cradling. I still can't quite let it go and have to keep pulling it down from the shelf periodically. I don't have an academic memory, and although I'm sure the impact of certain books is lasting on a deeper level, I like to keep it conscious by re-feeding myself with their wisdom. But then maybe this is what Etty Hillesum calls mental masturbation (in reference to nature, reading, writing and relationships): "Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up... I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it." (And for you non-rereaders), which she then believes she has overcome: "I was just as deeply moved... but somehow I no longer wanted to own it... and the scenery stayed with me, in the background, as a cloak about my soul."

[E A M Harris]

I find that I can reread really light books, like Agatha Christie, because I forget their details so they come over as semi-new.

[Guy Aron]

I just recently re-read The untouchable by John Banville, which I enjoyed even more than previously. I am just gearing up for a re-read of In search of lost time, something I think will take as long as the first time (i.e. several years).

It was interesting to read about the books that don't stand up the second time. I read Charles Frazier's Cold mountain, and found it extremely moving. Now I daren't re-read it, in case it isn't as good this time around. Perverse, I know!

[intrepidium]

I've enjoyed reading certain novels e.g. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Primo Levi's If Not Now, When? and The Periodic Table in English first and subsequently in their Italian and French editions ... would that be considered rereading?

[Another rereader]

I've been rereading A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle every couple of years since I was eleven!

[Irene]

I reread Barbara Pym. Hers are the books I reach for when I decide that I won't be falling asleep again even though it's 3 am. Half an hour with BP dispels all the frets that have been keeping me awake and I'm off to bed.

[DaAd]

Great piece. Shabbat or a Sunday, whatever day but one day per week, seems a good day to reread: to reread notes made during the week, to study the fragments that fall off, the textual crumbs that don't quite get swept away by time or at least not at first.
I've tried to reread Foucault, but it was more fun the first time. Sontag was a better rereading partner and, I agree, Garcia Marquez is good too. I long to reread Sagan.

[Patboy]

Milan Kundera's, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Think I have read it at least three times, with many years in between. Still too many unread works on my shelves.

[jimmigee]

Anything by E. Waugh or W. Faulker. Also A. Powell.

[James Connelly]

Marcel Proust's Recherche is an inexhaustible re-read. The Chatto & Windus/Modern Library version yet again. Next time (two years from now) it will be the Penguin version.