['Open Mike' is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP, wherein Yr. Hmbl. Ed. rambles afield very slightly more than usual. It appears either on Wednesdays, or when I get it finished.]
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In response to this, a couple of days ago: "I loved C.S. Forester's Hornblower books...and read the whole series through twice," Stephen Gilbert commented: "You only read the Hornblower books twice?"
Made me smile. But to answer seriously, I'm not actually a big rereader.
I've gotten to the age, however, that it's become a valid topic. I wanted to recommend a wonderful—well, promising—little book called Rereadings by Anne Fadiman. Her 'Introduction' alone is worth the price of admission. I'll use that as my justification for breaking the Pinker Rule.
The book is a compilation of the best essays from a feature in the journal American Scholar from the time Anne edited it, also called Rereadings, in which authors and writers would reread a favorite book from earlier in their lives and write an essay about their relationship with it—how they themselves had changed since the first reading, how the book changed for them upon rereading.
Which books were influential and important to you in early life will be different for most everyone, of course, but there are a few that I think could particularly benefit from rereading. Alice In Wonderland, for instance, is a truly weird little book, and you don't really get that when you're a kid and your reading tastes have been formed by Batman comic books and the gentler fantasy of things like James and the Giant Peach. A particularly valuable book to reread in adulthood in my opinion is A Christmas Carol, which might be the most celebrated and vivid depiction in classic fiction of a spiritual awakening and the changes in thinking that necessarily precede such an awakening. You need to be a reflective adult to read it that way, not just someone sopping their bread in the gravy of Christmassy effusions. Counterculture classics from the '60s and '70s like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (a retelling of Buddha story) benefit from revisitings. Most especially, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter begs to be reread as an adult, since its action (if not necessarily its themes) are adult by definition. If you haven't yet reread Joyce's Dubliners, that's an experience.
Many great readers and literary critics are famous for revisiting touchstone books. Susan Sontag famously read The Brothers Karamazov again and again, and Clifton Fadiman (Anne's father) estimated he had read Moby-Dick five times. Harold Bloom (who died just this last October) reread Shakespeare again and again, and show me a real Jane Austen fan who has not reread at least one of her books! Following the advice of my great friend Jim Schley, a writer on poets, what's important is not who you reread but that you reread someone, because it's important to your personal intellectual culture to engage at a deep level with at least one great author. On account of you cannot engage at that level with everyone.
A book that comes to mind that I've reread is O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, the 1927 translation into English of the Norwegian I de dage, published by H. Aschenhoug and Company of Oslo in two volumes in 1924 and 1925. The Nation called it "the fullest, finest, and most powerful novel that has been written about pioneer life in America." I read it as a young teenager, and at the time it struck me as a serious, adult book, and I was was proud of myself for reading it all the way through and finishing it—it seemed as bleak and featureless as the prairie, as serious as breaking the earth with plows to survive, and very long. On rereading it a few years ago I was surprised at how short and full of action it actually is! A great book either way, and a classic of the literature of America (although it's not American literature).
Anne Fadiman. Photo by Gabriel Amadeus Cooney,
compliments of MacMillan Publishers.
Anne Fadiman is a recent discovery, but she's a gem, a minor treasure. She can write. Fun fact: her family's dog is named Typo. She hasn't written much, so I intend to read it all. (Hey, I can intend.)
As an aside, as I was browsing through Clifton Fadiman's New Lifetime Reading Plan—chock full of entertaining little thumbnail reviews—it crossed my mind that I no longer have enough life left to read all the books he discusses. That's one of life's tragedies I can feel: "Life is Short, Books Long." Choose wisely!
Mike
UPDATE Wednesday: As usual with book posts, this one has cost me money! And the last one too—I had to buy By Brooks Too Broad for Leaping, the selected writings of automotive journalist Denise McCluggage, which turned out to be quite expensive, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I've never read. Al C., hugh crawford, and JimH all mentioned Denise, and Martin D recommended Magic Mountain—thanks to them.
It was costly in time, too—I had to spend an arduous hour rummaging in the attic of the barn where my library is now kept (and where it is gradually being destroyed by insects) looking for the copies of The Brothers Karamazov I know I have (didn't find them), and spent a number of hours comparing translations of several books from other languages.
There are so many fine old photography books up there in the attic of the barn. I just don't have room for them in the house. I was blinded by love when I bought this place—the next house I buy will have room for a pool table and bookcases, dammit Gumby!
By the way, I have to say that Amazon does a poor job with translations. You can look for just the translation you want, then click the Kindle e-book option on the proper sale page, only to find that the Kindle version reverts to a different, older, rights-free translation. There doesn't seem to be a way to get the Grossman translation of Don Quixote or the Woods translation of Magic Mountain as e-books, for example. In the case of The Brothers K., you can go the P/V translation, click Kindle, and the order page still says Pevear and Volokonsky...but the file you get if you order it is not the Pevear and Volokonsky translation at all but the old Constance Garnett translation. In the scope of the world's troubles this isn't much I suppose, but it's frustrating. At the very least, they should inform you which translation you're buying when you buy a Kindle version.
I did find my hardcover copy of The Scarlet Letter, the one with Barry Moser's illustrations, which I bought, according to the mark, as a remainder.
UPDATE #2: I had to laugh...just after I posted the above, this comment came in:
Richard Nugent: "MIKE! You have to slow down on these literary 'Open Mike' essays!! Between your recommendations (or mentions) and those of the commenters, I wind up ordering two, three, or even four books with every essay. I have a stack of eight unread ones on my table right now and I just now ordered three more through Amazon. I may have to give up eating and sleeping (and maybe talking with my wife) to keep up. Have some mercy, man!"
At least Richard knows now that I suffer because of the same problem too!
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Lance Saint Paul: "Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth reminded me of Faulkner, but more lyrical, flowing (he's a better poet in his prose than Faulkner). I first read it about 15 years ago (way late by the way)—I look forward to another reading in the future. Beautiful and harrowing. My roots are there, too."
Clayton: "Only two books that I remember reading several times—Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez and The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. Some Kurt Vonnegut books got two or three readings. Seems I am drawn to hilarious tragedy."
Mike replies: Then you might enjoy The Brothers Karamazov.
Robert Roaldi (partial comment): "I read Catch-22 three times, saw the movie twice."
Mike replies: Did you ever read any of the books that purport to tell the true story the novel is based on? Such as The Bridgebusters: The True Story of the Catch-22 Bomb Wing by Thomas Cleaver. Looks like an interesting book to read alongside the novel.
Eric Peterson: "Put me down for rereading Anthony Trollope. The more things change, the more they stay the same."
DavidB: "I'm in the process of rereading many of the fiction books I've held on to for many years. Of these, the one I have reread the most is Robert Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow. Some of those futuristic science fiction short stories are happening now."
ChrisC: "I made the mistake of rereading Orwell’s 1984 a year or two back. It was much more scary this time round."
Darin Boville: "I re-read book occasionally but not as any particular philosophy of reading, just whenever the mood strikes me. I’ve re-read Moby-Dick, yes, five times seems right. I keep a copy on my vehicle’s dashboard so I can ask people who ride in my FJ Cruiser for the first time to open to a page at random, read whatever sentence their finger strikes upon, and then treat that as a sort of fortune cookie. (It works.) I’ve re-read Lord of the Rings, all 1008 pages, including once out loud to my young daughter as a bedtime story (in many parts!) when she was too young to read.
"In my mid-40s I was having a long spell of bad luck with book, movies, music and culture in general. I started to wonder if maybe I’d discovered all the good stuff, touched on all the mountaintops and that maybe the rest of my life would just be filling in the nooks and crannies of my cultural map. But then I picked out Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I’d never heard of him. I read the book, finishing as I lay in bed, closed the book, stared at the ceiling a bit, then re-opened it to the first page and read it again. I'd never done that before, read a book twice in a row.
"For some reason that experience broke the spell."
Jeff Thompson: "For me, it was Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, Cannery Row and The Grapes Of Wrath. Prescribed reading at school when I was 15 or 16 years old. Tedious reading then, but I reread them as a 'knocked around by life' adult and loved every word."
Alexander P. Schorsch: "William Faulkner said that he reread Don Quixote every year."
Mike replies: Setting aside holy books, Don Quixote is believed to be the number-one bestseller of all time, with an estimated 550 million copies printed and sold in a great many languages over its 415-year lifespan. There is a fine recent English translation by Edith Grossman that has received very high praise. Carlos Fuentes, writing in the New York Times, said this about it:
[I] celebrate the great new translation of 'Don Quixote' by Edith Grossman. Nothing harder for the traduttore, if he or she is not to be seen as the traditore [the Italian words mean "translator" and "traitor" —Ed.], than to render a classic in contemporary idiom yet retain its sense of time and space. Up to now, my favorite 'Quixote' translation has been that of Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century picaresque novelist, who rendered Cervantes in the style proper to Smollett and his own age. His 'Quixote' reads much like 'Humphry Clinker,' and this seems appropriate and, even, delightful. The family relationship is there.
"Edith Grossman delivers her 'Quixote' in plain but plentiful contemporary English. The quality of her translation is evident in the opening line: 'Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.' This 'Don Quixote' can be read with the same ease as the latest Philip Roth and with much greater facility than any Hawthorne. Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading a 17th-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist."
Larry Wilkins: "I read The Sun Also Rises for the first time when I was in high school, and then re-read it several times over the next decade or so. I picked it up again in my late 20s or early 30s—and was appalled. For the first time, I understood an essay topic that a college English professor proposed, 'The only pity that you can find in a Hemingway novel is self-pity.' On finishing the novel, for the last time in my life, I felt like a needed a shower.
"And I second Stephen Gilbert's comment on the Horatio Hornblower books."
Martin D: "I first read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain as a young man, when I was at university. This is the novel to end all novels. I immersed myself into its world. The book changed my life forever and it keeps a clear presence in my life today. It's a long novel, a fat volume, and in those innocent days of my youth I read the book cover to cover three or four times within a few years. In the decades since, I always have a copy lying around somewhere in the house, and not a month passes where I don't pick it up and read a few pages.
"I have the advantage to be able to read it in the original German; Mann's complex sentences don't translate all that well into English, but I have coaxed many of my English friends into venturing into Magic Mountain land, and they didn't reproach me for it!"
Jimmy Reina: "In the early 1950s, I stumbled upon a used bookstore in the block where my father had a business. In those days, such stores also carried secondhand comicbooks and magazines, and I was injected with a drug that took 40 years to withdraw from. For a reader that loves books with pages, I can't think of a more indulgent pleasure than Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris. Now, when I haunt used bookstores, I buy all the copies I can find, and give them out to fellow book lovers."
Robert Stahl: "It doesn't get any better than rereading good and compelling poetry. A few favorites: Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Rilke, and Mary Oliver."
