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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

One of my friends doesn’t read novels. Why read about something that never happened, he asks? His preferred reading is history and biography, trying to understand the world and human behaviour by understanding the lives and times, the struggles and realities, of people in other places, at other times. However that only works if it is good history and good biography. Leaving aside whether anyone can or should write objective, impartial history – and whether even if possible, that would give us more insight than the passionately told narrative of what ‘happened’, the truth is,good history, good biography and a good novel are each capable of deepening our understanding, broadening our sympathy, stretching our imagination, sharpening our moral understanding, and extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

I am an unembarrassed novel reader. Literature of the imagination, stories that grow out of the rich loam of human relationships, excursions into other times and places and lives, enable us to enter worlds otherwise inaccessible, and to observe and consider what other people’s lives, (and perhaps our own) are about. I used the word ‘good’ – not exactly a term of academic precision, thank goodness! Novel reading for me has nothing to do with analytic literary deconstruction – a good novel is capable of doing for us some of the work mentioned above:

deepening our understanding,

broadening our sympathy,

stretching our imagination,

sharpening our moral understanding,

extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

Limiting myself to just one book by some of my favourite authors, here is a list of good novels that I’ve read more than once.

The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

The Deptford Trilogy, Robertson Davies

The Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler

A Burnt Out Case, Graham Greene

Father Melancholy’s Daughter / Evensong, Gail Godwin

Grace Notes, Bernard MacLaverty

An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

Unless, Carol Shields

Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

“Dreams, books, are each a world;

and books, we know,

are a substantial world,

both pure and good. Round these,

with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.” (Wordsworth)

Margaret (an education and motivation for learning specialist) is wondering about the different ways of reading we have all developed. She is especially intrigued by how some people (me included) read several books at once – not all together, but moving from one to the other and back again. It’s an interesting question(s) – how do we read and why do we read as we do? Thinking about it, I do usually have several books going at the same time, but that can be governed by a number of considerations.

I have set times in the day when I am likely to be reading – they aren’t the only times I read, but reading is about the only thing I do at those times. Those who observe the details of my blog have noticed the early posting times – I’ve even had a row for it from Graeme. But because my mind is active and alert early, for an hour in the morning I tackle the substantial book on my desk. Substantial means intellectually demanding, taking me to new ideas, challenging my comfortable assumptions. That’s when I’m reading John Swinton’s, Raging with Compassion, at present for example. So I always have an early morning brain workout!

Alongside that I’m likely to be reading at least a couple more. Functional reading for my teaching is mostly done throughout the week at times wrestled free of other responsibilities that can often seem more ‘essential’ than the reading that informs a lecture and keeps it current. Currently Migliore’s Faith Seeking Understanding, Joy Macdougall’s book on Moltmann (on sidebar), and a couple of Galatians commentaries, are lifted and laid around my desk.

If I’m writing something, then material is chosen by the subject and the reading clusters around the writing time – whenever that too can be extracted from the routine of academic admin and teaching. Recently baptist stuff (small b in deference to Stuart) and George Macleod have cluttered my desk.

Novels,( a good murder story – Henning Mankell just finished), poetry, biography (and philosophy I’m afraid) and other reading-what-I-like-when-I-feel-like-it, type books is usually at night -often the book preferred to the telly. Not always though – I can’t read a book and watch the telly. I have a friend whose daughter can read a book, watch the telly and listen to her Ipod without blowing any mental fuses! And for as long as I remember I’ve read in bed – but I am getting more and more like those dolls whose eyes are weighted to close as soon as they lie flat!

Now all that said – the question of how you read several books at once isn’t really answered. It probably isn’t timetable or routine or technique that’s the main issue – but the way different minds work. Some folk simply don’t move easily in and out of alternative worlds of fiction, biography, history, theology, poetry, psychology or whatever our different interests are. Concentration and afterthought aren’t easily preserved if too many things are going on at once, and there can be a feeling of superficial non-engagement:

The elephant is a bonnie bird

it flits from bough to bough

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

So is it a habit that can be learned; or a difference in how our minds process and assimilate what we read?

Who retains most – the one book at a time reader, or the several on the go at once reader?

What do the rest of you think?

Why do you read as you do?

Are you a one book or a several book reader?

Do you retain what you read and manage to keep the plots / arguments / worlds / of each book separate?

And isn’t the question of purpose important – Why I’m reading what I’m reading – for information, formation, recreation, inspiration?

One closing thought at this stage (cos I’m going to post a bit more on this) – having several books on the go at once, is that a multi-disciplinary way of learning, or is it pretentious dilettantism? Hmm? Come on Jim – own up – how much of that suff actually sticks?