On the turn and return
I was a terrifyingly voracious reader as a child, the kind of kid who really would read the back of the cereal box if it was on the table at breakfast because even a list of ingredients was better than having nothing to read. Which meant that I was a voracious rereader of books – I read more and faster than the trips to the library and Scholastic Book Fairs could keep up with.
And that was fine! While I loved getting to read something new, I never felt that revisiting a favorite was any less. What I wanted was to be reading, to spend time in beloved stories.
I kept up my rereading habits in college and in grad school. In a dorm or small apartment, I had limited space, and the requirements of classes meant I had limited free time, and so when I chose the books to take with me, I chose my favorites. The ones I knew I would find pleasure in reading, even if for the fifth or tenth time. Yes, of course, there was a campus library, of course there were bookstores when I had extra money, but I also had my security blanket shelf.
Becoming a writer changed my relationship to rereading. It changed my relationship to reading as well, but that’s an essay for another day. All of the sudden, finding a new book wasn’t just about finding something I might love, but about keeping up with the field, and keeping up with my friends’ books, and then there was the pile on the shelf and in my inbox to read for possible blurbs, and also there’s the article on the 17 Best New Gothics and the 29 Books Most Likely to Make You Cry. There were just so many books, and I felt like I should be reading all of them. There was pressure there – pressure that I put on myself, to be clear – where there wasn’t before.
Except even with a TBR pile that threatened to suffocate me, even with access to new books that that cereal-box reading child would have never believed, I didn’t always want the new. I missed my favorites, and I missed being a reader who read simply for love of story. So I let go of the guilt and the pressure to always be reading the new now next, and started going back to the books I’d missed. This was an excellent decision.
I tend to consciously reread most in fall (though not always – The Dark Is Rising gets read in December, as is proper for that book). Perhaps that’s because many of the books I go back to most often – Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Night Circus, Tam Lin – feel autumnal to me. Autumn, for me, conjures both the nostalgia of the season, and also a sense of the new year, because academia was my home for so long. It is an ending and a beginning, and so I become reflective.
And that reflection is one of the reasons that I reread favorite books, because I’m not just returning to a favorite story, I’m remembering the person I was each time I read that book previously. I am returning to past selves.
Or I am returning to measure a change. I did that this summer, rereading Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sarantine Mosaic duology (Sailing to Sarantium, Lord of Emperors). These books are about many things, but one of the things they are about is making art, and I hadn’t read them since becoming someone who makes art myself. I wanted to see if I read the books differently now, and I can tell you that I did, that I wept over reading about someone who “with fortune and the god’s blessing… might do something here that could last, and leave a name” because I knew, now, what it was to want that in a way that I hadn’t before.
Of course, it’s not always the case that returning to a book causes me to feel more moved upon reading it. Sometimes I have changed enough in the interim that a formerly beloved book now falls flat. Sometimes outside circumstances have changed my relationship to a book – I used to reread Sandman every fall as well, until I was fortunate enough to become a writer on Books of Magic. After that, rereading the original comics felt more like research for work, and not something I could reread like a fan. (I am aware that this is a good problem to have, but it is still a marked difference, like having to put on a suit to meet a friend when we used to hang out in sweats.) It is possible, of course, that another shift may happen, once enough layers of time build up.
Sometimes I find that I miss the person I was when I first read the book. And maybe that’s not an artifact of rereading, maybe that’s just fall and nostalgia, or maybe it’s just growing older. Sometimes both the book and the self are a glimpse at an old friend. But mostly I love when a book becomes a palimpsest for me, words written and rewritten and layered over, when I am able to greet myself as well as the characters between its pages.
The links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you buy a book using them, I may receive a small amount of money. The quoted text is from Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay.