I was curled up on the couch when my younger son walked by and made a woof sound. You had some pretty rough reads, hey? he said. I looked at him, puzzled, and he nodded toward the copy of Commonwealth on the table beside me. You’re reading Ann Patchett, he said. You reread your favourites when you’ve read a bunch of sad books in a row. He was silent for a moment, contemplating. Or bad books, he added.
You know, you go through life thinking that to your kids your personality is “Mom,” but then sometimes they surprise you by knowing your very soul.
He is right; that is exactly what I do if I have had too many depressing or heavy books in a row, or if I have had too many “how did this get published” books in a row. But in this case, it was neither. My post-travel library book flood had slowed to a trickle and, like parts of the creek beside which we walk every day, dried up completely.
So I thought I would take this opportunity for a little rereading. I love rereading. If I own a book, it’s because I want to read it more than once. The majority of the books on my shelves have been read at least twice, some many times more.
Someone asked me once why I would ever reread a book; after all, I know what’s going to happen, and there are so many unread books out there. To that I will respond that I certainly read more than my share of new books, and I find great joy and comfort in revisiting beautiful phrases, scenes, characters, and stories. I’m not a plot-driven person, and so it doesn’t matter to me if I already know the twist: I want to revel in the beauty of the words while we get there.
Because I reread so much and so frequently, certain scenes and sentences are constantly thrumming through my mind. I never pick strawberries without thinking of Mrs Elton in Emma, for example, and I am constantly mentally quoting from A Diary of a Provincial Lady. …that to live as I do, without any distractions, only leads to madness in the end. I will think of my poor nerves in the way of Mrs Bennett, the jelly won’t jell in the way of Meg March/ Brooke in Little Women when things are not going as expected. I always think of Grace Marks in Alias Grace when I have a perfect McIntosh apple: if I eat it, then it will be gone. My head is just generally a weird and wild swamp of song lyrics and literary examples at any given time of the day.
I do not like lending out my books because I am very emotionally attached to them, but I am certainly not precious about them myself. I think a cracked spine and stained pages show that a book, like the Velveteen Rabbit, is truly loved. Some books I have read until they have literally fallen apart, which requires delicacy when picking them up again.
One of my clearest childhood memories is when I was seven, just after my younger brother was born: my older brother and I were staying with my aunt at that time, and in order to escape from my pesty and ill-behaved young cousin, I read and reread A Little Princess over and over. It truly is a beautiful book that I have reread as an adult, and I will say that not only is it great in terms of story and clothing descriptions – a thing I value deeply in a book – but it is also a very interesting look at the plight of the poor and the wild class divisions in Victorian England. I have such love and sentimental attachment to A Little Princess, and I will hear no dissenters!
I feel similarly attached and sentimental about Little Women. I first read this at my grandparents’, who had a whole collection of these hard cover double books, meaning there would be two books in one.
Little Women was literally the only book in this huge collection that centred around girls, and I have, from day one, been almost exclusively interested in female-centred stories. The lives of girls and women, if you will. If I read Little Women once, I read it fifty times. I was deeply interested in the above-mentioned Meg: her preparations for the coming-out ball, the loss of her glove, and the scenes which are supposed to be instructive about vanity but I deeply identified with, her being dressed up and having champagne at the ball, and her desire for a new dress. I always thought that her husband was a total dolt, and that she could have done so much better, although this takes place during and after the American Civil War, so maybe she couldn’t. There probably wasn’t a whole lot to choose from.
When I think of my childhood, I think of all the time I spent reading and rereading favourite books, and as an adult, I find myself doing the same. I certainly had access to new books through the library, but I treasured so much diving back into a book I knew and loved. To this day, I can feel myself sink into happiness at the first lines, and then becoming thrilled anew when a beloved character is introduced or the plot turns. It’s such a great feeling.
Speaking of first lines, do you have any favourites? My top three are: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge, It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, and Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!
I am dedicating this week and the next to rereading, with the hope that no library holds come in, in the meantime.
Weekly Reading
Single, Carefree, Mellow. This short story collection, which I first read in 2021 and have read twice more since, gives me so much joy. What can I say, everything Katherine Heiny writes is pure gold. Some of the stories are connected and some aren’t, but every single one of them is a literary gift of pure delight. She’s just so witty and clever, and I was laughing so hard that I kind of stopped breathing and started to sound like some sort of seal. As with every one of her books, I have been going back and rereading paragraphs and pages that are especially wonderful, including but not limited to the following: “She collects garden gnomes,” Nina said. “You had an affair with someone who collects garden gnomes.” David sighed. “I know there’s that side of her,” he said. “But I never saw that.” Every single character is perfect, so much is conveyed in a single short story. I will never stop being completely in love with this book.
Speaking of garden gnomes, dear reader Heidi (HI HEIDI) sent me this one all the way from Germany. Of course I named him Wolfgang, and now he hangs happily in my spirea shrub. Thank you, Heidi! I love him!
I should probably point out that I am NOT having an affair, let’s not draw too many parallels.
Commonwealth. The book that spurred this post! In addition to being a Katherine Heiny fangirl, I am also a hardcore Ann Patchett fangirl, and so I decided to revisit this beautiful novel about a blended family and how it is affected by an unspeakable tragedy. This book also asks: to whom do stories belong? It is SO well-written and emotive that it moves me deeply in so many ways every time I read it. Every character is truly an entire book unto themselves, which is just like people, I suppose.
My Name Is Lucy Barton. Why not make it three authors of which I fangirl constantly? I adore Elizabeth Strout, and her style of writing is so spare, beautiful, and wrenching, which really describes this entire book. It is heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. It’s about poverty and trauma, isolation and abuse, but it’s also about escape and the ties that bind. Love is complicated, families are complicated, this book is complicated. I love it.
Anything Is Possible. The second book in the Lucy Barton series delves into all the people that Lucy and her mother chat about in the first book. If you’ve ever wondered whatever happened to so-and-so in your own life, you will appreciate this look into the various people of Lucy’s youth and where they ended up. I find it so interesting when people I knew “back when” end up living entirely unexpected existences. Well, the truth is I’m interested in where everyone ends up, unexpected or not, and so I loved this book.
I’ve decided to make Book Talk a mini-series until the end of the month. After all, there’s not much else to chat about, unless you want a minute-by-minute garden update! (or DO you?) Next week I’ll be talking about the opposite of rereading: DNFing, and then I will talk about genres, choosing what books to read, and making the time to curl up with a book. I’d love it if you’d join in and let me know if you are a rereader, and if so, what are your favourites? I’d love to hear about them. xo
