On Rereading
I reread a book every year now, and the book I have picked this year is one I loved at seventeen and would not have looked at twice since.
The first thing that happens on a reread is shock at the sentences. Not at the plot, which I remember, but at the prose itself, which turns out to be a foreign country. The famous opening I quoted at every opportunity is clumsy. The description of the sea that I underlined in pencil is one I would now call purple. There is an entire chapter of weather that I have no memory of and no patience for.
And yet the book has not become worse. It has become different, and the difference is entirely in the reader. This is the thing I keep arriving at: a book is not a fixed object with a fixed meaning, it is a fixed set of sentences and a moving set of people reading them. The book does not know that you are forty. It is waiting there, patient and unchanged, and you have walked in to find the room rearranged.
The second shock is stranger. Some sentences I once found embarrassing are now the best lines in the book. A description of a parent's tiredness that I skipped at seventeen because I thought it was showing off now reads as the truest thing in the chapter. A joke that made me laugh has stopped doing anything at all.
Rereading is a measurement, then, but not of the book. It is a measurement of the distance between the person you were and the person you became, which is a distance you cannot get any other way. Your old diaries will lie about it; your old taste cannot.
So I mark the pages I skip. Not as a judgement on the book, which has survived my changes, but as a map of my own narrowing and widening. Some years I skip a great deal. Some years I find I have skipped a page I used to love, and I go back and read it three times, and that page turns out to be where I have changed. That is also the argument for keeping books: not the story, which is in the story anyway, but the evidence of who you were when you read it.