Each year, as I look over my list of all the books I’ve read (and listened to) in the past year, I always take note of the books I chose to reread. My reading habits are never planned out very far in advance and generally my selections are highly impulsive (often whatever I happened to put on hold at the library), and so deciding to reread a book is usually also a spur of the moment thing. Looking back, I’m always interested in what compelled these impulses and why I decided to reread the books I did, and ultimately what I gained from these rereads.
This year, I reread five books—Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, P.G. Wodehouse’s Something Fresh, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Ross. E Dunn’s The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (a nonfiction book about the famous traveler that I’d first read back in college). The Ibn Battuta book was for research on a short story, and the P.G. Wodehouse one was for a vague idea I had for a future novel (as well as for a blog post I wrote on comic novels). Rereading The English Patient, meanwhile, was, as I also chronicled in a blog post, inspired by a negative review that I felt was highly unfair.
I decided to reread The Sellout and The Crying of Lot 49, however, not for practical reasons or immediate circumstances, but because of a deeper longing: a positive memory of those books, and specifically a desire to return to the language and rhythm of each. This, I think, is the most powerful reason why many of us chose to reread a particular book, and it speaks to the idea that, beyond plot and character and even thematic meaning, it is language itself that resonates most powerfully and lingers in our memories long after we’ve forgotten the book’s other details. I’d first read The Sellout two years prior, back in 2016, but I honestly didn’t remember very much of the novel’s story except for the general concept. I recalled a feeling, though, a sense of righteous anger, and I remembered a hilarious, half-ironic, cynical voice speaking in long, complex sentences—and it was this feeling that compelled me to return to The Sellout, not a desire to relive the narrative or even reacquaint myself with a particular character, but to hear that voice and rhythm again, to return ultimately to the language of the book.
This desire to experience a particular rhythm is also what inspired me to reread The Crying of Lot 49, something I’ve done regularly for the past several years. Pynchon writes like no one I’ve ever come across, a unique, swaggering, vaguely off-kilter prose, like someone balancing objects of varying sizes in a great tower and then gleefully watching as it crashes to the floor, in the process somehow managing to be simultaneously manic and lyrical. Whenever I’m feeling frustrated about my prose, stuck in a dull and tedious rhythm, I return to Pynchon to revitalize my writing, to remind myself that modifiers can come in all shapes and size and that the “spare” and “clean” prose so popular today is not necessarily best for me. Moreover, for a writer, returning to old favorites can be a good reminder of why one chose to devote themselves to literature in the first place. This year, perhaps because of the impending publication of my own first novel, I was feeling a larger despair about novels in general and the prospect that nobody would read my work and that I’d spent all these years creating something that ultimately didn’t matter. Rereading Crying helped me push aside those feelings and reminded me that in the end, it’s all about language, and that if the language has beauty and power, then the larger work will endure.
Sometimes returning to an old classic can also give you a glimpse of a past version of yourself. Last year, I reread Volume One of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (titled after the Nicholas Poussin painting), a four-volume series of semi-comic and semi-autobiographical novels which six years ago had been one of my favorites, about a group of friends in 1920s and 1930s England and how their lives change against the backdrop of the changing twentieth century (the series is often described as “English Proust”). Initially, I’d been drawn to the story’s focus on art and literature and how the lives and preoccupations of the mostly upper-middle class characters felt relatable to my own, despite the distance of time and geography. More recently, though, as my tastes grew more political and experimental, I felt embarrassed that I’d so thoroughly enjoyed something so stuffy and old-fashioned and emphatically conservative in its political orientation (a central theme of the novel is the decline of the British aristocracy against modern currents such as finance capitalism and Marxism). Rereading the novel was a fascinating experience in scrutinizing with a critical eye the tastes of my younger self, but it also served as a way to understand how many of those interests still persist, how even though I now would rather read a postmodern novel than something from the Edwardian period, I’m drawn to many of the same subjects I was then, art history, writer protagonists, the comic buffoonery of the upper classes, etc. Most importantly, I understood that underneath everything, it was the prose of Anthony Powell’s novels that I’d fallen in love with, those beautiful sentences written with the care and detail of an old master’s brushstroke. Once again, the power of rereading came back to rhythm and language.