A Second Glance

                         

I ought to be writing a substantive post about books (or something else). But I am just not feeling up to it. Instead, I decided to fill up blog space with some light weight (but hopefully not boring) observations about books I have read more than once.

It is not often that I go back and re-read a book.  But there is a small number of books which have received my attention a second time - some because I wanted to read them again and others because my book club selected a book I had read a long time ago and I had to jog my memory.  All the books I list here to describe how they withstood the test of time, were first read in my teens or early twenties and revisited years and decades later. The experiences of a repeat read were varied for different books and sometimes they were surprising.  (Please feel free to chime in with your own experience of reading a book a second time.)

Older and Newer Classics:

Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens), Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), To Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee):

First round - mesmerising. Second time - equally electrifying. 

My Antonia (Willa Cather), Ethan Frome (Edith Wharton), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen): 

First round - good reading but somewhat rustic, frumpy and boring. Second time - stunningly beautiful for their astute, soulful and gentle insights that I recognized more fully in light of my mature perspective. 

Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell) : First round - a riveting account of love, romance, war and passion in an historic era (I was thirteen when I first read GWTW). Second time - melodramatic and somewhat soap operatic account of love, romance, war and passion in an historic era.

War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy): Failed to go beyond 100 pages - both times! Now you know my secret. I am incapable of reading Tolstoy. Anna Karenina met with a similar fate but that I tried just once!

Popular politics / philosophy:

Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler): First read around age tweny two, repeated two decades later.  A polished gem both times around.

Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand):  I had read three books by Ayn Rand in my late teens. Of these only Atlas Shrugged got a second look.

First round: Growing up against a background of hypocritical parroting of touchy-feely and somewhat utopian sloganeering of Gandhian philosophy by Indian leaders and elders, Ms Rand seduced  with her "brave" individualism. Second time: With my adult appreciation of the simple, altruistic and cooperative spirit of Gandhianism (with which I don't agree fully but that is a whole different post) and other liberal ideals, Ms Rand and her selfish, narcissistic and reactionary world view engendered revulsion and disdain.

Catch 22 (Joseph Heller): This one was a stunner both times but for different reasons. 

First round - made me laugh, made me cry and took me to seventh heaven. I loved the book. Second time - I started to read it recently after recommending it to my book club because I thought in view of Bush's war, it would be fitting reading material. My friends, those who had never read it, loved it.  Amazingly enough, I myself felt oddly disconnected from Heller's masterful grasp of absurd humor, human tragedy and satirical take on war.  I stopped reading after the first few chapters in order to preserve the memory of the euphoria I had felt when I first read it in my early twenties.  Not at all what I had expected from re-reading a book I still consider one of my favorites!

Crime, suspense and mystery:

This is one category which rarely lends itself to re-reading - when you know the ending, what's the point? But I did revisit a few of the favorites of my youth for retro-enjoyment and because once I was in a situation where there was not much else to read. Here I will go by the authors rather than particular books. I have pretty much read everything that the following three wrote, starting around the age of eleven.

Ian Fleming's James Bond novels:  First round - thrilling and titillating high adventure. Second time - what a buffoon!

Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle : Dame Agatha and Sir Arthur charmed both times across the span of decades.

Apart from the books mentioned above, there are some other authors who have retained my admiration through the ages. Many are Bengali (my native tongue) writers unfamiliar (except perhaps, Tagore) to the majority of readers of A.B. Another not widely familiar author (to US readers) who still unfailingly holds my attention is P.G. Wodehouse. I wrote what probably qualifies as my most spontaneously joyous post  on A.B. about the incredible Wodehouse.  Oddly enough, one literary genre which still brings a smile to my adult  lips is Bengali children's literature . This amazing and little known (outside the Bengali reading community) body of literary work probably qualifies as the most sophisticated children's literature in the world. I know it sounds surprising. But take it from someone  whose reading  juices were tapped early for a life time of addiction by the delicious smorgasbord of Bengali kiddie lit.  I won't prolong this particular discussion by digressing into that unfamiliar and hard to explain territory. Those who are interested, please read mine and other afficionados' comments on Amardeep Singh's excellent post on Bengali sci-fi and children's writing.

I don't know if anything is to be deduced about the lasting value or innate quality of a book by measuring whether it delights once, twice or forever. If a book manages to give the reader enjoyment at the time it is read, for whatever reason, that I think is triumph enough.   

Update: By sheer coincidence, I discovered this morning that this week's Newsweek has an enjoyable article on boomer reading habits. Now that the oldest of baby boomers are turning sixty, Newsweek has been running a Boomer File of their cultural backdrop of humor, politics, music and literature. The boomer reading list in Newsweek, unlike mine, only includes iconic literary works published in the 1950s and 60s.   

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

Inspiring, thoughtful remarks about a traditional (as opposed to a 2.0) medium. My wife, a children's librarian, will shortly be referred to the Singh post. Meanwhile, my two cents. I started, but never finished, Catch-22 during high school. It was all swagger and clever humor, and therefore tedious, as far as I was concerned, and I don't think I'll ever be able to get over that initial impression. More recently, I had the same response to Don Delillo's Underworld. There will likely be no second glances for me at either of these.

Then there is a writer whose works I won't read twice, but not because I don't enjoy them. I adore the novels of Anita Brookner, precisely because they are rather predictable. If you've read one, you need only wait for the next year's title to get a second glance at her understated, sometimes blissfully uneventful musings on mind, emotion, and the burdens and benefits of social engagement. Her protagonist is typically a single woman of a certain age, who responds to a perceived crisis in her life (a crisis that may consist of there being no crisis adequate to her expectations) by reflection and impulse.

[BongoP'o'ndit]

Now you have touched of a chord. Any talk of books and/or reading habits triggers off mental drooling.

From your extensive list the only ones I have reread are: Catch-22 (twice), Agatha Christie, Doyle, Wodehouse & Bengali children's lit (multiple times).

Catch-22 - read it in high school and then again in college - loved it both times. Perhaps I should have another go at it now.

Doyle - Sherlock Holmes mysteries in abridged versions were actually one of my earliest reads. Since then, have read the originals several times as well (and Bengali translations too!).

Christie - Still like reading some of her books, even when I know who did it! In my later years, was struck by the rather caricatured portrayal of foreigners (bordering on racism) in her books.

Wodehouse - No need to add anything here !

Bengali Children's Lit: You hit the nail on this one.
Oh, the joys of reading, re-reading to the n-th time those gems till some of the cheap binding would fall off !
My favorite is Ray, but closely followed by Shirshendu, Sunil Ganguly, Ashapurna Devi, Lila Majumadar, Samaresh Basu, Premen Mitra etc. It is amazing that such prominent and insightful authors of 'adult' fiction could effortlessly create an engaging wonderland for younger readers.

Some other books I keep re-reading: Douglas Adam's Hitchhikers Guide, Jerome K Jerome's Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) and Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (both are like Wodehouse, good anti-dotes for blues), Asimov short stories, Calvin & Hobbes and Far Side strips.

Sorry about the rather long comment - could not help it (and am inspired to write my own post on books!).

[Ruchira Paul]

Dean & Bongo:
Thanks for weighing in with your own views. I wonder if movies too are subject to this kind of revision.

Bongo, being in the habit of commenting loquaciously at other people's blogs, I am not impatient with long comments by readers. In fact, when a comment sheds relevant light on the subject at hand, short or long, it is very welcome.

Thanks also for seconding my claims about Bengali children's lit. I often feel that by sheer accident of birth, Bengali children are handed a key to a secret pleasure garden. Whether they choose to use it any more, I don't know. Most of my close friends in school were non-Bengali. Some of them understood Bengali but couldn't read it. I remember spending many idle hours in school and in the school bus, reading aloud to them my favorite Bengali stories - both young and adult works.

[Joe]

Right now when I read books that I very much enjoy (most recently, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, perhaps the single best book I've ever read), I have no desire to reread them -- probably because I feel like there's so much to read that I haven't yet read.

But I do have one addition to this list: the Tolkien "trilogy plus" (i.e. The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy). I read those when I was probably ten years old -- and maybe again a couple times shortly thereafter -- before picking them up again after many years of collecting dust a winter ago. First time: wow, this is a fun story! Second time: this guy sure can write; he created a vastly more complex world than I'd realized; interesting to see literature built largely out of the Beowulf tradition (by an outstanding Anglo-Saxonist).

[Arnold D'Souza]

All I have to offer is this -- Anything that is sufficiently bad must also be sufficiently good. And vice-versa. :)