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After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn't, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn't to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment. Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen's fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.… (more)
User reviews
I notably reread Spindle's End, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, CS Lewis, some Charles de Lint, some of my favorite poetry like Sappho and William Carlos Williams... I've also reread some books and been ever so disappointed in what I'd remembered was wonderful.
The running theme throughout the book is sameness and difference. Clearly one returns to the same text on rereading. How then is it possible to experience a palpable difference in that text’s reception? Either the reader must have missed something the first time around (since the text remains the same), or the reader herself must be different. At various points Spacks opts for both these explanations, though favouring the later. Her lifetime of reading, she argues, has changed her and in so doing, it changes what is possible for her in relationship to some beloved text.
That reading changes us as readers is taken as read by Spacks. It is, I think, a more controversial claim than she acknowledges. Fortunately, I agree with her, and am therefore more than willing to go along with her on her journey. I especially enjoyed her chapter on Jane Austen, whose novels she too thinks warrant multiple reads. At times she wants to test whether books she loved when she was very young, such as Alice in Wonderland, can hope to sustain anything more than a sepia-tinted pleasure. They can. Of course some books on rereading do not fair so well. And it is this difference in opinion on rereading that Spacks eventually finds most disturbing. Rather unfortunately it undermines her confidence in her judgement. But I think at this point she fails to take seriously her initial axiom: reading changes us. If this is true, then the judgements rendered substantially later on rereading cannot and should not be in conflict with our earlier judgements.
Read this book for its fine prose, its refreshing engagement with literature that you too may wish to reread, and its serious treatment of a phenomenon that deserves far more scrutiny and analysis. It may not be the book you are looking for, but it will serve, perhaps, until that one comes along. Recommended.
Ultimately, this is not quite what I thought it would be, but it just may be better. I'm very impressed with how much Spacks finds in the Austen books; it looks like I will have to reread Emma again! As the book continues, it becomes a bit more academic, but the first half is certainly a delight.
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essay on jane austen