The Second Reading Is a Different Book
A second reading is not the same book. The sentences are the same and the page is the same, but the thing you have in your hands has changed, and the change is in you.
The mechanics of it are straightforward. The first time through, you do not know what is coming, and you read for the story. The second time through, you know what is coming, and you read for the structure. You are no longer being surprised, so you start noticing how the surprise was built: which detail was put in early and left alone for a hundred pages, which piece of dialogue would mean nothing to a reader who had not seen the last chapter, which of the book's three endings was really its first.
It also changes the opinions, and this is the part that took me longest to accept. A book I could not stand at twenty I now think is one of the finest things I have read. A book I was completely in love with at twenty I now find tiresome, and what has changed is not the book but what I want from it. It wanted to be about the weather and the drawing room and the slow unfolding of a marriage, and now I want a book to have a spine, and I cannot help it.
Changing your mind about a book turns out to need three things, and the third is not optional: distance, other people, and time. Distance, so that the old reading stops being the only one you can hear. Other people, because an opinion held alone becomes a habit very quickly, and a habit cannot be revised. And time, real time, years of it, not a good weekend.
This is why I distrust anyone who says they have never changed their mind about a book. It is also why I keep a list. It is not a list of books I was right about. It is a list of books I was wrong about, with a note beside each one about what I had failed to understand the first time. It is longer than the other list would be, and it is the more useful of the two.