This is simultaneously too easy, and pretty difficult. If I buy a book (as opposed to borrowing it), I want value from it. Spending £7.99 on a paperback, to me, is the same as spending upwards of a fiver on an album – if it’s worth listening to again, I will, so if it’s worth reading again, I will. Some people counter this with the argument “once you’ve read it, you know the plot, there’s no joy in reading it again” – I say “Specious!”.
When you read a book for the first time, you immerse yourself in discovery. The plot, as they say, thickens. You find novelty in the development of characters. Plot twists are suitably twisty, shocks shock and awesome moments awe. This is not lost, exactly, when you re-read a book, but the freshness of it dims.
On the obverse, I find, there is a greater appreciation for the little things. The best example, and one which shows just how well planned the whole damned thing was, is the Harry Potter saga. Once I’d read the seventh book, I re-read the entire series, back to back, with little respite. The plot hangs together brilliantly, and while there are ideas which I’m sure came to Rowling midway through, certain small things do pop up later, mainly to do with the character of Severus Snape. Much of it, of course, it due to the tying up of the plot in Deathly Hallows; however, the whole was planned in one fell swoop, so I believe, and thus it makes re-reading the saga, as a whole, that much more satisfying.
The other reason I re-read books is for the language. Tomes mentioned here previously are rich in their linguistic tics – whether playing with certain perspectives, as in Middlesex, or simply using the broad-sweep of Anglo-Indian vocabulary to bring to life what could become a turgid take on family life in A Suitable Boy. I love reading these two in particular, but others as well (Waugh, Wodehouse, Bill Bryson’s travelogues, Le Carre) for their styles, and the brilliance with which they mould English into their own inimitable styles.
The book which stands out, for me, as a linguistic tour de force, is James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Told, in no uncertain terms, by my English teacher at 15 to read this, I was not the most literary of chaps. I was reading Tom Sharpe, the brief phase of “lad-lit” (Tim Lott, John O’Farrell), and books assigned by the school – nothing, really, was very literary. On reading this, and then re-reading it, to make sure I’d even started to understand it, I was bowled over.
Here was a writer playing with language. Plot was important, as it was, after all, a semi-autobiographical journey from toddler-hood to student-hood, but the way in which the narrative voice grew in maturity from “moo-cow” to long, flowing passages of angst and self-reflection astounded me. I was shocked, and impressed, by the monologue and mania in the section at the retreat. The explosion of emotion at the end, when Dedalus falls in love, was powerful stuff for a 15 year old. I devoured it, and still do; it’s the only book that can take me back nearly a decade – the only thing that makes me thankful for going to my school. If it wasn’t for being there, I would never have been taught by this teacher, and he’d never have ordered me to read Joyce.
It’s a pity I had to write an essay comparing it to Jane Eyre (really, I ask you: “presentations of school in Jane Eyre and one other book” – I could have been so much more pretentious, and I do believe I wrote over 10,000 words… that essay may in fact still be in the loft) but that did not dim the lustre. This is, without doubt, the book that got me into reading serious, grown-up, canon-fodder (groan).
