On Re-Reading Books

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

While I don't agree entirely with this quote by Oscar Wilde, in the sense that there are some books which are brilliant and beautiful which don't lend themselves to re-reading, I'm wholly in sympathy with the spirit of the quote, that re-reading books is a big part of reading because there is much to be discovered in a good book on the second or third read that was perhaps missed entirely or only grasped vaguely the first time around.

That aside, we revisit beloved books because we love them, the first read was so enjoyable that we want to relive it, spend time with characters we love and in worlds that we'd like to escape to.  One of the books that I've re-read more than most is 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff.

This is a collection of letters that Hanff, a struggling writer in the New York of the 1950's exchanged with Frank Doel, chief buyer for a second-hand bookshop in London called Marks and Co. who were located at 84 Charing Cross Road.

The letters are warm and funny, clever and chatty. It's two people writing to each other about their lives and about the books they love. This is the first book about books that I ever read. I fell hopelessly in love on the first read and I've kept going back to it ever since.

Another book that I like to re-read  is A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle. This is an account of a year that the author and his wife spent in rural Provence, their first year as owners of a farmhouse that needed a fair bit of work. The book is divided into twelve chapters one for each month, and it is a diary of sorts, a detailing of their day to day life.

It's about the sheer pleasure of being in rural Provence, living life at a slower pace, shopping for fresh ingredients, cooking and having leisurely meals, drinking wine and pastis, going to a local restaurant for Sunday lunch...the kind of retired life that we all dream about. Peter Mayle writes with such a genuine appreciation for all the good things that he's surrounded by that this is comfort reading of the best kind.

2001: A Space Odyssey is a classic and I love it. I've read it a couple of times, and enjoyed it, but it's the sequel, 2010: Odyssey Two that I can't get enough of. I've lost count of the number of times I've re-read this book.

I know everything that's going to happen and when and how it's going to happen, but that doesn't matter.. This is a book about big ideas, ones that are worth engaging with again and again. I was a teenager when I first read this book, re-reading it at different points in my life has let me see how my thoughts on the big questions have changed and evolved.

Which brings me to another aspect of re-reading. Revisiting books that we loved as children can sometimes be disappointing. I remember reading and loving King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard when I was a kid. It's a great book, in terms of the story, but reading it as an adult there were several things that made me uncomfortable, the colonial attitude to natives was one. I got past that, reasoning that it was typical of the time when the book was written, only to get to a sequence about elephant hunting, and I was done. I couldn't read any further...

Two of the writers whose work is re-read most often are Jane Austen and J R R Tolkien. No one who loves any of Austen's books is content to read them just once, and given the sheer number of films, TV shows and other books that her work has inspired, it's obvious that people continually re-engage with her characters and stories. While I've read all of Austen's books more than once, it is Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion that I go back to again and again.

There are many in the Tolkien fan community who re-read The Lord of the Rings every year and they insist that there's always some detail, an intriguing reference, an interesting bit of word play that they hadn't noticed before. I've read The Lord of the Rings a few times and I have to agree. There's so much detail in these books that you start picking up when you're no longer reading to find out what happens.

Two writers that I will mention in conclusion are P G Wodehouse and Terry Pratchett. I've been reading their books since I was teenager and I enjoy them as much today as I did back then.