Years after I began recording what I read and watch, I learned that Steven Soderbergh does something similar: “At the end of each year, the filmmaker … posts a list of everything he watched and read in the previous 12 months.” I can’t match him, but if I write it down, I can use my notes to try to “remember.”
Over the last several years I’ve become not only an avid reader, but also a dedicated rereader. Rereading is a way of revisiting what has pleasured me in the past and a recognition that as we grow — and grow older — our sensibilities can change. For instance, in my late teens I adored The Catcher in the Rye and, just a few years later, The World According to Garp. But soon enough those books fell out of my favor, and now I recognize them as short time enjoyments. On the other hand, I presume if I were to revisit a book (or music, or film) that I wasn’t so fond of, I might have changed my mind to see them now more positively. In 2023 such was the case with my reading of Russell Banks, Henry James, and John Steinbeck.
“It feels really good to stop hating something. And music is a good place to start. Because while records don’t change over time, we can and do. Better late than never.” — Jeff Tweedy, “I Thought I Hated Pop Music. ‘Dancing Queen’ Changed My Mind.”
“… Having confessed that I have lived my life through books, I can at least report that I have done so with conviction. Which is to say, Mr. Ulysses, that I have read a great deal. I have read thousands of books, many of them more than once. I have read histories and novels, scientific tracts and volumes of poetry. And from all of these pages upon pages, one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as you have experienced it….” (Abacus Abernathe, p. 423, in Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway.)
Also from The Lincoln Highway: “Yes, the boy read the story exactly as he had in the boxcar, but Ulysses didn’t hear it the same way …” (p. 324; see also 349.)
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We’re drowning in old books, from a WaPo story. After reading, I ordered True Grit and Bring on the Horses from ThriftBooks.
| Eudora Welty once wrote that art is the voice of the individual doing its best to speak truth, “and the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.” — WaPo article about “spring cleaning,” in this case, enough, already, of movie biopics.
“A novel worth reading is an education of the heart,” Susan Sontag said. “It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.”
Novels teach us “how to be alone,” Jonathan Franzen has written; they stoke, says Sven Birkerts, “the more reflective component of self.”
“That we possess inwardness at all is thanks to literature, Harold Bloom claimed, attributing the very conception of the inner life to Shakespeare.” — From Parul Sehgal’s review of Fake Accounts, a debut novel from Lauren Oyler.
“To read a book is to absorb, consciously or not, all the other books that influenced that book, as well as the books that influenced those books, and so on; to interpret even one paragraph on a page is to vector endlessly back in time,” the NYT’s [Molly] Young writes in her review of Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins, a collection of essays about reading and writing. She’s describing rereading.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” — Joan Didion, 1975 commencement address to graduates at University of California, Riverside.
In “After Henry,” an essay for and about her former editor, Henry Robbins, Didion said, “an editor, if the editor is Henry Robbins, was the person who gave the writer the idea of himself, of herself, the image of self that enabled the writer to sit down alone and do it.”
Both of the Didion quotes above found in a LofA weekly newsletter.
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Vivian Gornick can’t stop rereading, NYT. | Gornick’s new book is part memoiristic collage, part literary criticism, yet it is also an urgent argument that rereading offers the opportunity not just to correct and adjust one’s recollection of a book but to correct and adjust one’s perception of oneself…. It is one of the great ironies of consuming literature that as much as we read to expand our minds, we often take in only whatever it is that we are primed to absorb at a particular moment. Do not, Gornick says in this brief, incisive book, let that be the end of it. The book: Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader. Similar story in The New Yorker.
| [Pianist Mitsuko] Uchida, 74, is an artist who returns to the familiar, especially the works of Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, as part of a lifelong argument for the benefits of repeated examination. “The great composers always change,” she once said in an interview. “And as you change, they change.” Link to recording in Apple Music. NYT review of Uchida’s Carnegie Hall concert on Feb 24, 2023.
Above: Favorites for rereading shelf, Nov 15, 2023. From left: Catch-22 (Heller); A Prayer for Owen Meany and Cider House Rules (Irving); Crossing to Safety (Stegner); True Grit (Portis); A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway (Towles); Team of Rivals (Goodwin); Lonesome Dove (McMurtry); All the King’s Men (Warren); Prodigal Summer (Kingsolver).
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Salman Rushdie: “It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.” — The Stories We Love Make Us Who We Are, NYT 052421
“Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude,” Anika Burgess writes. “And when you live in a city like New York, a book can be even more than a story at your fingertips. It can also be a respite, an escape, a sanctuary, a diversion and a travel companion.” / The Times Book Review published photos of people sneaking some reading time around New York. Find the entire wonderful collection here.
“There’s something about being able to read an entire book in one sitting that’s emotionally very satisfying.”
Ann Patchett on Why We Need Life-Changing Books Right Now, NYT 033020
“Books are very important and precious to me,” she said, “so I had a very difficult time as a child when people wouldn’t return the books they had borrowed.” — Banana Yoshimoto, quoted in Read Like the Wind.