Re-readings

This collection of essays on books which authors read early in life, and later re-read, is a fascinating study of how we grow and mature and change. We develop new values, broader perspectives, are less taken in by the sense of our own importance, and become more self-consciously critical of what we used to absorb with joyful and liberal imagination. Some of these essays are therefore about adult disillusion, or at least, disappointment. These essayists discover that a book which is remembered as formative, delightful, exciting, or perspective changing, on being re-read decades later is discovered to be shallow, narrow, tedious perhaps even harmful.

Others re-visit their chosen book and discover that the intervening years have given them deeper appreciation of what they earlier sensed, and wonder how they could have missed so much in their first reading. Perhaps all this is because we read what we read at a particular time and in life’s circumstances as they are given to us, and by the time we re-visit the book years later we are no longer the same person. We are more mature, worldly wise, more questioning – whereas we used to be children, naive, more trusting; the world was different and so were we, and we are remembering it from a different world too.

I had the same kind of experience when I revisited a couple of the places where I grew up as a child. The burn wasn’t deep and dark and exciting to cross on the stepping stones, it was really a jumped up ditch; the trees I climbed weren’t of amazon rain forest proportions, they were – well, just wee trees. The wood of fir trees that was a half day’s trek away when I was 10 could be reached in fifteen minutes by car. The school (pictured here, one of 14 schools I attended) had become engineering offices. What changed – not the places, at least not only the places, but the person visiting. Reading this book called Rereadings, set off a related but different train of thought – about the books I have re-read, and what I gained in the re-reading. It’s a truism that as we get older we do less new reading and some more re-reading – perhaps so.

Here in no order or categories, are some books I have read more than once – and may read again, and even again. Some are by authors whose other books I’ve also read. They wouldn’t be the same for any of us – and I’d be interested in what others think worth reading more than once. Or does no-one else re-read?

Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, W H Vanstone

My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

The Outline of Literature, John Drinkwater

The Interpretation of the New Testament, Stephen Neil and Tom Wright

The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jurgen Moltmann

The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, (ed) B. Holland.

An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer