The Case for Rereading

Remember when you were little and every book demanded to be read and then reread? A million times? What was that all about? Margaret Hunsberger writes about rereading as holding repeated conversations with a text.Here's what I'm rereading now.I first read Diane Ackerman's book more than ten years ago, and every time I return to it I get something new. I have changed, after all, since that last read, so the text takes on new meanings each time. Take a look at Ackerman's wonderful books for young readers as well.Sue Silverman's marvelous guide to writing memoir is worth rereading many times even if you have no intention of ever writing in this genre. All writers dig into the past, after all. It's the stuff we have to work with. The emotions we once felt, the experiences we can remember, the memories that haunt us--they offer us windows on everything else. On this third read, Sue speaks to me more clearly than she did before. I am in a kind of sisterhood with her because she has spoken to me before and I have chosen to return to continue that conversation.Emily Carr's a relatively new find for me. A year ago, Sarah Ellis gave me a beautiful little book written by this spunky Victoria, BC woman, an intense and passionate artist, writer, a border-crosser if ever there was one. In The Book of Small, Carr looks back upon her childhood in what was once a frontier town. It's like taking historical maps and laying them out over present-day spaces. The past glimmers through and illuminates the here and now.I will never be able to read everything on my list. Not if I live to be a hundred, not even assuming that I'll retain enough brain to keep on reading. But rereading...that grounds me in who I am and promises new understandings that I can't yet imagine, much in the way that revision sheds new light on a murky early draft. First reads are a different kind of delight, but save some time to revisit old friends.