Last week I went to the labyrinth again. In case you’re wondering whether or not there’s a limit on the benefits of labyrinthing, there isn’t. This was my best visit yet—I was fully immersed in the walking pattern and was able to think a lot about my health, my book, and what I want to do next.
My multiple labyrinth visits made me think about re-reading books. Is it a waste of time and energy to read a book a second or a third (or even more) time? In some cases it can be a comfort, like THE LORD OF THE RINGS, which I’ve read many times over the years.
I recently read Annie Dillard’s THE WRITING LIFE twice: once to get my hair blown back from my face by the full-on assault of Dillard’s forceful and eclectic words on writing, and a second time to slowly mine it for good quotes, of which there are many. This is, after all, where the quote “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” comes from, though we often forget that there’s a second component: “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.” It was exhilarating to read this book twice—I felt I could read it a third time and get even more out of it.
Then there was a book that surprised me the second time I read it—I realized I didn’t like it as much anymore. I had read Carol Shields’s STARTLE AND ILLUMINATE (collated by her daughter and grandson after her death), several years ago. It’s a book about the writing life, like Dillard’s, but pulled together from Shields’s papers in the Canadian archives. I remember enjoying it the first time I read it, and pulled it out again because I was looking for a book on the craft of writing. I was sorely disappointed. My favourite—and only—quote from the book is actually written by Shields’s daughter: “the days cannot be lengthened, but they can be stretched.” Beyond that, I found the book repetitive, particularly the section where the collators pulled together letters Shields had written to writers, which all had some version of “vague pronouns” or “needs some thickening in the description.” I was disappointed. Perhaps the first time I read it I was in a different head space. Maybe I felt like I needed more hand holding, and now I’ve moved past that stage and am looking for (reading/writing) mentors who challenge me more, and can help shape my writing life.
Other books are impenetrable unless you read them multiple times. Recently I read MOUNTAINS AND DESIRE: CLIMBING AND THE END OF THE WORLD by Margret Grebowicz. It’s a series of essays largely about Everest, and addresses the culture of climbing and how much it has changed since Mallory and Irvine summited in 1924. I read it from front to back and felt like I just skimmed the surface. I wasn’t sure what I’d just read, and couldn’t pull any strong themes from it. Then I started dipping into the book randomly—reading the third essay, then the last one, then the seventh one, etc. Suddenly it made more sense to me. Somehow, reading the essays in order made me feel like there should be more connection between them than there was. Reading them out of order made them standalone pieces from which I could pull context and meaning. One of the things that Grebowicz emphasized was that mountains have cultural capital in our society. She writes: “…environmental degradation isn’t just material, it’s also cultural. The cultural meaning of environments [like Everest] is another “resource” humans use up.” I hadn’t thought of that previously, and wouldn’t have discovered it if I hadn’t read her book twice.
There are also the books that you think you don’t like until you read them a second time. I’ve just catalogued my book collection (1300 books!) using the online app LibraryThing. As I went through each bookshelf, I discovered books I forgot I had, that I wanted to read. One of those was STONYGROUND: THE MAKING OF A CANADIAN GARDEN, by Douglas Chambers. In it, he chronicles the creation of an estate garden on his family’s 150-acre parcel of land in the farming region of Bruce County, northwest of Toronto, in southern Ontario. After the first read through, I felt like it was a poncy, snooty book about an English professor at the University of Toronto who had money to burn to create a massive garden on the scale of the estate gardens of England and to live in two places (Toronto and Bruce County) at the same time.
Not having a second book on my nightstand and not quite ready to go to sleep, I started flipping through the book again to see if I’d missed anything. I ended up on the chapter in which he describes the various inscriptions he has installed around the garden. At first I had thought it was silly to have these inscriptions that only he knew the meaning of—a kind of ‘in’ joke that only he and a select few would understand. But as I re-read this chapter, I realized that it didn’t matter whether or not the visitor understood the message, as the garden was Chambers’ alone. He could do what he liked, and he did. While I still marvel at the amount of money that must have gone into that garden, I felt more charitable towards the gardener himself. And I read a few more chapters again to remind myself that it was a massive undertaking that required an overarching vision and plan, something that I’d never be able to wrap my brain around. Smaller scale gardening is more my thing!
Other books I’ve read several times include Charlie Hailey’s THE PORCH, a masterful literary work focused on the role of porches in literature and society, based around his own cabin porch on the water in Florida. James Bridles’ WAYS OF BEING, about humanity, AI, ecology, and learning. SPROUT LANDS, by William Bryant Logan, a historical and geographical exploration of coppicing and pollarding techniques used to manage woodlands and obtain resources without killing trees.
Of course, I also read books multiple times when I’m writing a review or interviewing the author. But that’s a different kind of reading, with an intensity that I don’t think I could sustain for all the books I read. I feel like I have to extract every last drop from a book for review, which I don’t feel when I’m reading for pleasure.
What books have you read multiple times? What did you discover the second time around that you’d missed originally? Or was it just the same book as the first time, nothing new?
