One of the many anecdotes about Edie Sedgwick that got my attention while reading Jean Stein’s excellent biography recently, is that she was known for carrying around a copy of A Tale of Two Cities. Whether Edie actually read the book or just carried it for show (as her sister claimed) is anyone’s guess, but it made me think about the books that mean a lot to me. While I’ve never carried around A Tale of Two Cities, there are a handful of books that I find myself rereading every year or two.
I always find it interesting to hear what books people like to reread, especially if the book has become a part of their everyday essentials. I think this started when I was a teenager after I saw an interview with Kurt Cobain in which he said:
“I’ve read Perfume by Patrick Süskind about 10 times in my life, and I can’t stop reading it. It’s like something that’s just stationary in my pocket all the time. It just doesn’t leave me, and every time I’m bored, like I’m on an airplane or something, I read it over and over again.”
Shortly after seeing this I read Perfume, although not ten times. Interestingly, Cobain’s quote reminds me of a somewhat similar one from Michael Hofmann that was shared on social media a few years ago, in which he revealed the eight books that he always keeps close by and rereads.
Hofmann wrote:
“I’ve now read Like a Fading Shadow four times, and I can see it will be one of a handful of books I open and start reading – somewhere, anywhere – at least once a year for the rest of my life. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Nightwood, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Under the Volcano, The Enigma of Arrival, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, The Beginning of Spring: these are novels with magic in their molecules. They may be prose, but they demand to be reacquired periodically in the way that otherwise only poetry does.”
Similarly, Donna Tartt once said:
“I certainly haven’t enjoyed anything more than “The Unquiet Grave,” by Cyril Connolly, which I went back and reread sometime early this year. I’ve loved it since I was a teenager and like always to have it to hand; when I lived in France, years ago, it was one of only six books I carried with me…”
So what is it about some books that makes them resonate so much with us that we need to keep them close at hand, ready to open up “somewhere, anywhere” and reread?
These types of books usually have sentences underlined; the spines are worn, pages torn. You can even quote from them at length. Books that don’t just ‘furnish a room’, but that we consider to be part of us.
The books that I find myself returning to are: For Esmé—with Love and Squalor and Other Stories; Jacob’s Room; Hour of the Star; Le Grand Meaulnes; Good Morning, Midnight and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
If I’m reading a library book that I know I’ll want to read again, I will go out straight away and buy a copy, sometimes before I even finish it. As was the case with Malte Laurids Brigge when I was so struck by a passage that I ran out of the house (I don’t think I even shut the front door) and sprinted to the bookshop as I needed to own it immediately. I might be exaggerating here but only slightly.
It's reassuring that Rilke himself knew how this felt from what he wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:
“Among the books that are always close to me is the Bible, and also the books of the great Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. I do not know of any writings that have, in their entirety, so much quiet purity, so much truth, as these. Read, if you have not already, his wonderful book Niels Lyhne, and his shorter stories (especially The Plague in Bergamo). A whole world will envelop you, the happiness, the abundance, the unspeakable immensity of a world…..[Niels Lyhne] is one of the most important books in my life. I keep returning to it and find something new in it every time. The more one reads it, the more it becomes a part of one’s life, spreading out like a landscape, like a country one has grown fond of and never wants to leave.”
So what do I get from rereading certain books? I agree with Rilke that each time I’ve revisited them, I’ve found something new and in a sense they have become part of my life.
As Ali Smith wrote in Artful:
“We’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once. Books and music share more in terms of resonance than just a present-tense correlation of heard note to read word. Books need time to dawn on us, it takes time to understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought, and always in correspondence with the books which came before them, because books are produced by books more than by writers; they're a result of all the books that went before them. Great books are adaptable; they alter with us as we alter in life, they renew themselves as we change and re-read them at different times in our lives.”
These books are like an album that gets played over and over again, with certain pages that I am continuously drawn to like my favourite songs. When I look at my favourite albums, one similarity is that I didn’t really connect with them the first time I listened to them. Blood on the Tracks, Kind of Blue, The Dreaming and many more all took repeated listens.
That's always the hope I have when I open a book for the first time; that I will want to read it again. As Hilary Mantel said “a good book is never the same twice”.
Anyway, I’m considering rereading A Tale of Two Cities
.