One of my guilty pleasures is re-reading. There are tens of thousands of novels published worldwide each year of which there might be (I’m just guessing) maybe a thousand that, given sufficient time, I might find worth reading. On my current pace, I will be lucky to get through 60 novels this year. And those are not restricted solely to recent publications. So any way you slice it, there are going to be a rather large number of novels I do not read in my lifetime. Reading a novel a second or third or tenth time seems like an extravagance, a dereliction of duty somehow, almost selfish. Yet I do so enjoy returning to a novel that has given me pleasure in the past hoping, perhaps, to rekindle my admiration for the author, or revise it, as may be the case. And sometimes I thinking reading again is my favourite form of reading.
That may be one reason that I find talking to other readers about a recent read we’ve shared to be so much fun. It forces me to go back over the novel in my mind and attempt to articulate what I like or didn’t like about it, what I thought was clever or dull, where the author surprised me or disappointed me, how a phrase or image or paragraph leapt off the page for me. It isn’t re-reading itself, but it is part of that process. And the more input I get from others, especially careful and sensitive readers, the more likely I am to enjoy my experience of reading the novel again.
For the first time the book club I frequent has given me the perfect excuse for reading a novel again. A little more than a year ago, I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It reminded me what an exquisite craftsman Baker can be. A marvel. It triggered a bit of a Baker-fest in my reading schedule. So it was a great delight to discover The Anthologist on the list of books to be read in the book club this year. Now I have to re-read it. And I get the added bonus of anticipating a hearty discussion of same.
Will my fellow readers be as taken with Nicholson’s prose as I was? I have no idea. Will I be as admiring on a second read? I certainly hope so. In any case I expect to find a great deal more in the novel this time than I did the first time. Who knows, it may even prompt another plunge into Baker’s back catalogue. I can hardly wait.