I look through my bookshelves, not at the high stacks of unread books, both classics and hot new titles, but at the ones I have already read and have not come to the end of. That small minority of books that don't disappear from the mind after the last page is read. For the serious lover of literature, one of the most essential parts of being a reader is being a rereader.
In my writing classes, most of my students tend to be professionals, very smart and opinionated, used to being successful in their own areas of expertise. When we talk about why we read, the divide always comes down to reading for entertainment or reading for spiritual nourishment. The best books provide both, and because of that dual ability, it is essential to read the first time just for the pleasure of letting the story wash over you, just to get the lay of the land, to find out that most basic of story questions: what happens next? Then on a second reading, we are prepared to absorb the deeper claims of the book that center on language, imagery, and artistry.
We may read for information, for entertainment, but the most important reason, the one that is most ephemeral, is that we read for a spiritual connection that can't be provided in the same way through any other art form and rereading is essential for this. Going back to Anna Karenina for the fifth time, one notices things like the passing of time in the book, feeling the pangs of it in the very first exchange between Anna and Vronsky on the train. We know, like gods, that the hopes and aspirations that these two characters bring to this meeting are utterly deluded, doomed, but still utterly human and captivating. Would any of us forgo the grand passion of the book because of its tragic ending? The scale of the story, the intersecting plot of Levin and Kitty, the political and social rights of women in Russia at the time of Tolstoy's writing the book, are mere footnotes to our witnessing the eternal dance of seduction.
There is a special set of books that I own that have been reread so many times they are falling apart. I have multiple copies of each for this very reason. All of us devoted rereaders have such a pantheon, books that we intend to keep reading every few years for the rest of our lives. What I find striking about my set is how unlikely and disparate the subject matter. If you read for entertainment, you can limit your subject to teenaged vampires, but spiritual nourishment comes from the most improbable places: a woman having an affair (Anna Karenina); a man going up the Congo in a ferry-boat (Heart of Darkness); a bullfight in the afternoon (The Sun Also Rises); two orphaned girls living with their grandmother in rural Idaho (Housekeeping); a burn victim in WWII (The English Patient); a young man drafted to go to Vietnam (The Things They Carried). What these books all have in common, for me, is that they touch on Flannery O'Connor's "mystery of existence."
Recently, in honor of the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, I reread one of my favorite story collections, The Things They Carried. The story, "On the Rainy River," is the most powerful anti-war story I have ever read, and yet it takes place mostly at out-of-season fishing camp on a river in Northern Minnesota on the Canadian border. I remember the power this story had on me at eighteen the first time I read it, because although I wasn't going to war, I like most other teenagers, understood the pressures of family, of public expectation versus private conscience. This story is an illustration of Faulkner's "human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about." But the utter tragedy of the story is different to me now as a grown woman. I wonder at the society that makes a human being willing to do what he knows in his heart is wrong. Who will ever answer a passage like the following to his own private, permanent, satisfaction?
What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself?
Would you think about your family and your childhood
and your dreams and all you're leaving behind?
Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry, as I did?
Rereading provides a way for us to remember who we are and how we got that way, to take stock of our hearts. The important books in our life change us. We remember our reactions to favorite passages like returning to childhood homes or long lost loves, and we measure our matured understanding by those very same passages, better equipped to plunge forward into our lives and into the new worlds of those beckoning, unread books.
Tatyana Soli attended Stanford University and the Warren Wilson MFA program. Her stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, Nimrod, Third Coast, Carolina Quarterly and Sonora Review among others. Her work has been twice listed in the 100 Distinguished Stories in Best American Short Stories and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Tustin, California and teaches through the Gotham Writers' Workshop. Her first novel, The Lotus Eaters, will be published on March 30, 2010. Read BookBrowse member reviews of The Lotus Eaters, which is currently rated an overall 4.5 out of 5 stars - one of our highest rated books to date.
Visit Tatjana online at tatjanasoli.com
