Rethinking rereading

It may be that there are two types of people: those who reread books, and those who do not. Until a few years ago, I fell unashamedly into the first category. But I’ve had some misgivings since talking to a friend, who was surprised to hear how often I reread. He could, he said, count on one hand the number of books that he had read more than once. I was shocked too. Before then, it had never occurred to me that there were one-time-only readers, people who read even their favourite books only once.

But as my friend pointed out, there is a compelling argument against rereading. There are so many good books and so little time—it’s impossible to get through all of them before you die. Every time I choose to reread a book, I am effectively adding one more to the enormous pile I will never read. When you put it like that, how can I justify rereading Middlemarch for the fourth or fifth time when I could be starting on Moby Dick? And in any case, isn’t there something deplorably unadventurous about rereading?

However persuasive these arguments are, I have, guiltily, continued to reread. So I came to Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading hoping that it might excuse, or at least explain, the compulsion to revisit books.

As a professor of English literature, Spacks rereads books for a living, but she’s also a recreational rereader. Both of those roles shape her book, which falls somewhere between memoir and literary criticism. Framed by a few general thoughts about rereading, the book relates a series of reading experiments. Spacks revisits books, comparing her current impressions to her experience of reading them for the first time. Her list encompasses childhood favourites, a couple of Jane Austen novels, books from the 1950s, 60s and 70s that she enjoyed at the time of publication but suspects will have dated badly, books she has taught, and books she disliked the first time around.

Rereading a book loved over a decade ago, she finds, may provide a comforting continuity, a sense that both we and the book have remained essentially the same, but equally it can reveal how much we have changed, or how different the book is from our memory of it. Perhaps we like it just as much, but for different reasons; perhaps we don’t like it at all.

The potential for disappointment is greater in rereading than in first-time reading, but so is the possibility of revelation, of noticing and enjoying things that previously escaped us. As a child, my favourite part of Jane Eyre was the beginning, when Jane too is a child; as a young adult, I was more interested in the adult Jane. When I read it again at university, I had recently seen Polly Teale’s theatre adaptation and I’d read Wide Sargasso Sea, which gave the novel a very different aspect. Now when I read it, I hold all three of those readings in my mind—and expect to find new ones.

There’s a huge difference between rereading a book you know intimately, and going back to one you barely remember. Samuel Johnson may have claimed that there has never been anything written that was “wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress,” but I—and I think most rereaders—disagree, and not just because I found Robinson Crusoe quite long enough. There are plenty of books I have wished longer, even those with entirely satisfactory endings. Turning back to the beginning and starting again is the closest I can get to having that wish granted.

Rereading is, Spacks says, an “inherently conservative” practice that “holds on to the reader’s past.” But I am not so sure. Spacks’s own experiments reveal so many different ways of rereading that to describe it as inherently anything seems misleading. Rereading overwrites first impressions as often as it brings past experiences back in all their glory. And simply knowing we might come back to a book later only reminds us how partial and provisional a first reading can be.