It’s a gift when you can do that, when you can forget

September 9, 2024 12:05 AM

Some people say rereading is the only reading, but sometimes I think first readings are the only rereading. This isn’t total nonsense. First readings are when I pay the most attention, do the most doubling back. They’re when I have the most capacity for shock and joy. When I reread I am always comparing my experience to my first impression, a constant distraction; I am tempted to skip and skim, to get along with it and verify my memories already, my belief that I already know what I think. You can reread ad infinitum, but you can only read something for the first time once. from Same River, Same Man by Elisa Gabbert [The Millions]
posted by chavenet (3 comments total)

That's a very narrow view of reading and rereading. When I first read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager, I perceived it as an adventure story, and wow! what an adventure! In my last rereading, I paid more attention to details, such as how Tolkien describes the changes in the land as the adventurers proceed. I "paid attention" both times, but looked at different things.
posted by SPrintF at 7:57 AM on September 9 [4 favorites]

Elisa Gabbert is wonderful. I've reread her collection, The Unreality of Memory, twice now. I've been slow to get to her new book as I've been busy with my own projects, but it's on my list. (I believe this Millions pieces is in the new book.)

I mentioned her briefly in something I wrote recently for my blog: My Death Inches, specifically her close reading of Auden.

Great writer.
posted by dobbs at 9:35 AM on September 9 [1 favorite]

When I first started reading (very late by Metafilter standards), if I truly liked a book and read it in that compulsive state in which you glance up at the clock and realize a couple of hours have passed with no awareness of time, I could not reread it because I'd get this weird echoey feeling that progressed to nausea within ten minutes or so.

This lasted well into adulthood and really only abated in middle age. When I was in college, I decided to give Lord of the Rings another go because I loved it so much in high school, got the feeling, thought 'this is ridiculous!' and persisted, only to end up in the bathroom with dry heaves inside half an hour.

I still can’t reread it, and the very idea makes my gorge rise a little bit — and the worst of it is that I no longer think LOTR is even a good book, and I cannot tell whether that’s mature better judgement or a lingering aftereffect of the way it made me so sick.
posted by jamjam at 11:16 AM on September 9 [2 favorites]