Rereadings (2005)

This collection of essays culled from The Atlantic column Fadiman edited was chock full of musings by people I'd never heard of but completely enjoyed. I had to pause this book because life took over, but that was no fault of the book or the essays. As I read, I was torn between the desire to find a highlighter to mark some particularly delicious or poignant passage and the desire to just keep reading. Inevitably I will read this book again. So many of my own thoughts, experiences, and ponderings over the rereading of once beloved books are shared by these assorted writers that sometimes it felt as if I just never took the time to phrase the thought I read. With few exceptions they traveled back to books I've never read and may never read, often books in the heights of the Western canon (although David Michalis's essay about reading the printed lyrics on the back of the Sgt. Pepper's album is by far my favorite, perhaps because I share some of those particular experiences with the LPs of old).

I think this book is particularly apt for the person entering his/her forties who looks back to those significant books of adolescence and early 20s and fears the revisit will poison the original, important, formative experience. These readers felt that same fear, and while their results did vary, I don't recall any particular ruination taking place. If anything, there's some "What the hell was I thinking?" -- which I suspect most of us climbing into our middle years ponder when looking back -- and more often a greater and deeper understanding both of the written work and the person we were when we read it. ( )

This year I’ve decided to make rereading a priority and so this essay collection was a perfect read to pick up. Just like any essay or short story collection, there are both strong and weak pieces. The book itself isn’t amazing, but the sentiment it shares is an important one. It’s another great reminder that I need to make time to reread books I love.

I wish there had been a few more essays that referenced books I know. I could identify with the piece on Pride and Prejudice and Brideshead Revisited, but not as much with a field guide one woman had grown to love. The sentiment is the same regardless of the book though. Sometimes you return to a beloved book and realize the story now seems childish or more problematic than you remember. Other times it makes you fall in love with the story all over again. No matter what happens, it deepens your relationship with the book.

“One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago, and memories will jump out with as much vigor as if you’d opened your old diary.”

“And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former. ( )

A collection of seventeen essays by writers and essayists who have all shared their thoughts after rereading a book first loved before age twenty-five. Like most collections, this one is made up of hits and misses, though I enjoyed Rereadings more than I didn't, perhaps because everyone in it had something to say about the act of rereading itself, so even when I wasn't too interested in the book they were discussing or terribly excited about their prose style, there was something to latch on to. Highlights for me included Patricia Hampl's piece on the journals of Katherine Mansfield and Diana Kappel Smith's essay on Peterson's Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-Central North America; YMMV of course, but recommended to anyone who likes books about books and reading. ( )

Another weakness: anything with Anne Fadiman's name attached to it. Rereadings is a collection of book reviews that Fadiman ran whilst at The American Scholar literary quarterly. Each review is a rereading of a book the reviewer (usually a writer themselves) had read long in their past. As Fadiman points out, each is more of a mini-memoir than a review of the book itself. Since I seem to currently be into memoirs and essays, this suited me just fine, plus the entire book is making recommendations for further reading! As if I needed more to read!

The eventual conclusion that each review comes to is: Everything Changes but the Past remains the same. The reviewers largely find themselves rereading with more perspective and experience, but remember their old selves, motivations and weaknesses (their ignorance and their bliss) vividly through association with the text. It makes me incredibly happy to hear others talking about their love of books, and how a life of reading has bolstered a life of writing. These aren't great literary accomplishments, these reviews, but they are familiar, as if hearing a friend tell you a long story after dinner in order to make the point: you might like the book, too.
Read in the original context on my blog

For the many Ex Libris fans, anything with Anne Fadiman’s name attached to it promises to be a treat. And I – having read all her books – expected nothing less than wonderful. That is certainly true of Rereadings, but with some qualifications. Fadiman compiled these essays that were first published in her magazine, The American Scholar, but only the Foreword offers her trademark “familiar essay” style. Each of the other seventeen pieces included here is written by a different distinguished author who has, like Fadiman, revisited a book (or poem or music album cover) that was especially important in his or her youth. Some of the essays are light, even humorous, but others are dense, academic, even difficult. A fine mixture of styles and interests is on offer here, from a scholar’s journey experienced through The Charterhouse of Parma to a heady love affair with nature experienced with A Field Guide to Wildflowers in hand, to a childhood seen through the eyes of Sue Barton, Student Nurse or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I was especially touched by Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” re-experienced as a voice of hope after 9/11, and particularly attentive to a revisiting of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, a book that guided me through a difficult teenage year. In the end, though, it was Arthur Krystal’s unpredictably charming essay on a boy’s boxing book, The Leather Pushers, that most delighted me. I hate boxing in all its forms, but couldn’t resist passages like this, about “bookish heaven” for a fourteen-year-old boy:

… reading was fun – not serious fun, mind you, but sequestered, magical, self-absorbed fun. Nothing mattered but the story: who won, who survived, who ended up happy, who came up short. Moreover, all novels – adventure, historical and fantasy – were on a par; all were equally good. If someone had told me then that the books featuring Tarzan, Scaramouche, the Count of Monte Cristo, Ivanhoe, Jean Valjean, Long John Silver, and Kid Roberts had been written by a single person using seven pseudonyms, I would have concurred at once.

If this passage takes you back to your innocent days as a young reader, you will at least love this one essay. If it doesn’t, you’ll have many other perspectives to choose from. In this collection, there is likely to be at least one description of “bookish heaven” that you can identify with. And you may find, as I did, that you are tempted to take a “rereading” journey of your own after you have sampled these. If you do, let me know how it goes. ( )