This is a hard post to write because I’m not at all a backward looking person. I’m not nostalgic about my past, I have no yearning to go back in time and be 20 years old again, I don’t remember good old days with any outstanding fondness, and I seldom re-read a book I’ve already enjoyed the once. No, I’m forward looking, always yearning for what ‘s coming next, always curious about the next new thing, always anticipating the as yet unknown pleasures of tomorrow, and anxious to read the upcoming unknown book that I haven’t cracked open yet. It’s far more likely that if I re-read a book it's because I’ve forgotten that I read it before. When this happened about twice in one year, I began keeping a book journal to avoid it happening unintentionally again.
But even for a person such as I, sometimes I find a book that having been read once creates the desire to read it again. In fact, I think I’ve just finished reading such a book: The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon by Tom Spanbauer. What’s it about? Some have described it “as the way the West was weird.” The Kirkus Review said, “Spanbauer creates a pansexual West that John Wayne wouldn't have recognized.” I will tell you that it’s about love, identity, heartbreak, violent death, racism, myth, religious intolerance, tormented souls, and magical realism. There, I think that about covers it.
Please turn the page
But the question this book stimulates is what qualities must a book have to make you want to read it again? I’ve thought long and hard about this and have decided that beyond the intangibles that I can’t articulate clearly is probably a single characteristic – intelligence. That word, applied to literature may be just as gauzy, for defining what I mean by ‘intelligence’ is complicated. To start with, there should be no car chases. Heh heh. Seriously, intelligent fiction respects the fact that readers are intelligent. Intelligent readers’ tastes run to complex and evolving characters whose personal journey in the book takes precedence over any other element of fiction. Intelligent fiction is stunning but not sensational, is deep but not prolix, is moving but not maudlin, is original but not affected in the attempt, and is profoundly human; that is to say, it resonates with the varied and probably universal human emotions, desires, and behaviors.
Intelligent fiction is not familiar. By that I mean it doesn’t tell the story you’ve read in all its repetitions. The most famous of familiar fiction is formulaic as in, boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Coming of age books are often formulaic: young person exists in a dysfunctional family, young person feels alienated, young person experiences sexual awakening, young person is betrayed by close friend/family member, young person suffers crisis of faith in humanity, young person meets guru figure, young person sees the light, young person will be okay from here.
Intelligent fiction is not always easy. By that I mean it isn’t necessarily fully comprehended on first reading, or it leaves you breathless, overwhelmed, and in awe such that you need to retreat from the reading experience for a period of time and mull it over, or the subject matter is unique to your experience and you feel you don’t understand what you’ve just read but want to learn more about it so that you will. It can be a story that is powerful and painful, making you simultaneously afraid to go on but impelled to read by the force of the narrative. It can even be as abstract as difficult non-fiction books sometimes are, necessitating slow reading that is accomplished by biting little parts out of the whole, chewing slowly, and digesting what you’ve read for a while before going further into the story. Umberto Eco comes to mind. So do Neal Stephenson, A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, and Anita Brookner.
Intelligent fiction somehow always manages to feel new, even unique. I have no idea how other than the author is so skilled at framing structure, creating a prose style, or revealing the secrets of a character through development that one sinks into the reading experience. When I get hold of such a book, after I’ve finished reading it, I invariably have a feeling of heaviness, a somewhat hypnotic hangover, a disorientation to my present whereabouts, and a disinclination to reorient myself to reality. Often in those times, I want to go to bed in order to force myself to dream about the book in my sleep in an effort to sustain and prolong the reading pleasure.
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a piece of intelligent fiction that I will re-read some day, probably within five years in order to test my memory against it, to re-visit the pleasure and the pain of Shed’s bildungsroman, to be reunited with the indomitable Ida Richilieu, to become reacquainted with the philosopher cowboy, Dellwood Barker, and to hope that I don’t find on second reading that the book did not age well, is preachy, even clownish, seems overwrought and contrived. In short, I hope I don’t feel that my taste has misjudged and that the time spent in reading the book again proves to be time ill-spent.
There are several books that I have re-read and never suffered an iota in doing so. All of Dorothy Dunnetts several novels, all of Barbara Tuchman’s histories, more than a few of Dickens’ works, particularly The Pickwick Papers. Will and Ariel Durant’s oeuvre, The Name of the Rose, Love in the Time of Cholera, East of Eden, Crossing to Safety, anything by Austen. I’ve re-read Oz books, Treasure Island, and Lewis Carroll’s fantasies. I’ve re-read Greek plays, Shakespeare’s works, and novels by Virginia Woolf. All without disappointment, all with that feeling of refreshment, of having reconnected with an old friend, with surprise at how much I’d forgotten, and with gratitude that on second reading the experience was even more satisfying than the first.
I even have a quasi list of books I plan to re-read. The first book on that list is War and Peace.
What about you? What do you think is the most important quality a book must have for you to read it again? What books have you read again? How was your re-reading experience different from your initial reading one? What one book have you put off re-reading that you intend to re-read before you die?
The New Kindle Fire
Turning attention to other things. . . Who is already on the waiting list for the new Kindle Fire? I am fired with the desire for this device, but sadly, out in the sticks here at the edge of the Everglades there's no WiFi. Guess I'll have to move, or purchase MyFi.
What is the Kindle Fire? That’s the full color touch, WiFi only (no 3G), reading, media playing, surfing tablet scheduled for release in six weeks. While we’re on the subject of e-readers, you can now borrow books from your local library for reading on your Kindle. Hooray! Check your local library and the Kindle web site for “how-to.” Have you checked out Lendle (follow the link for bonus surprise information), the “public domain” for lending Kindle books among registered users of the site? Finally, an open book-swap for e-books! More ways for happy e-reading.
I wonder what’s next?
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Other than that, nothing's happening.