On reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading [Essay]

What does it mean to read a book?

Since I began maintaining a list of books that I’ve read, partly as a record, but also partly to help jog my memory if I return to an author, the list has grown to near 1,600 volumes. I use these notebooks (eclectic in size, until I began using Moleskins) to trace patterns between novels; to identify themes; sometimes to recall plot or character. I am erratic in my notekeeping; some entries have detailed plot summaries, others don’t. Some say gossipy things about the author. Some consist, simply, of only a few impenetrable, gnomic words. They are numbered, and cross-referenced.

I don’t mention this to boast, but simply to demonstrate how much a person who fully partakes in the literary world, with all its myriad inkslingers and scribblers, might consume. And I imagine I am not alone in this.

The list began in October 2008 with Dag Solstad’s Novel 11, Book 18, a book I reviewed for the New Humanist; and its most recent addition is a children’s book, part of a round up I’m undergoing for Literary Review. Seventeen years; almost a hundred books per year; one book every four days or so.

Leafing through the list made me wonder what it means to read something. I admit that I have next to no memory of the Solstad. This is the bare note: “Compelling, perplexing, extremely moving but ultimately bleak”, which gives me nothing. Reading the review again provides not a spark of recognition: and I gave the book away long ago.

Can I then, reasonably, be said to have read it? I certainly did read it, seventeen years ago. I remember where I was: my flat in East London, the year my first novel had come out, and I thought the whole world would open up (as, in a way, it did).

I read the Solstad carefully and well enough to be able to produce a short essay on it. Given the hoarder that I am, I probably have kept the notebook in which I wrote down quotes and thoughts. But I wouldn’t be able to have a conversation about it now; I had, in fact, forgotten all about it, until I picked up my first notebook to begin this piece.

How much does reading involve memory? How long can one be expected to have a memory of a book? And what exactly do those memories entail? Plot? Character? Setting? Quotes? Leafing through my notes, I am assailed with sudden shafts of recognition: about Magnus Mills’ The Maintenance of Headway, for example, which I read in 2009. My note says “Entertaining allegory about buses”. Suddenly I find my mind swimming with familiar yet imprecise images. By contrast, The Death of King Arthur by Peter Ackroyd, in 2010, brings a sense of vague disappointment that someone could treat this wonderful material so badly.

When I read a novel again, I mark the note with an “r” for rursus: my notes tell me I re-read The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton in 2011, and I apparently wept over the last pages in Yo Sushi in Victoria Station. This I don’t remember; but I do remember Newland Archer, and the terrible prison that he constructs for himself.

Reading, then, must involve some measure of re-reading. So, at a stroke, a huge percentage of those 1,600 novels and non-fiction tomes vanishes, and we are left with perhaps a few hundred or so books, which I have read more than once.

There is, of course, Shakespeare: when I read - studied - Hamlet for my A level English exam, I effectively memorised the entire play. I lived within its echoing, shimmering, dark architecture. I re-read it at university; I’ve seen it several times on the stage, as well as on screen; I return to it as often as a bee to a pollen-bearing flower. And yet, each time I re-encounter it, I want to read it more, and it still never feels as if I really know it.

Similarly, King Lear, a small copy of which I carry around with me: at university I had internalised it so much that my conversation was peppered with quotes: “tis a naughty night to swim in” became a kind of code between me and my friends for not wanting to go out. These plays, and most of Shakespeare, I can claim to have really read: and yet, and yet, there is still so much to do with them. I sense gaps in my knowledge: in my understanding of them: in my understanding of Shakespeare as a whole. I begin to see why people specialise: why they spend their whole lives immersed in one thing, and one thing only.

It’s the same with Homer: something I began reading, as a child, in translation, and then as a teenager in Greek; and then, at university, all the way through; as a tutor, I must have re-read certain passages dozens of times. Recently I began re-reading it in Greek, with the aid of a Loeb. It didn’t take long before I could look simply at the Greek without the aid of the English, those strange, harsh syllables forming images in my mind once more, and again I am standing in the golden halls of Troy, and Aphrodite is fetching a chair for Helen, and Priam is castigating his sons for liking dancing more than fighting. Why do I never grow tired of it? Does it change? Do I change? Does the act of observing the text more than once, like some mysteriously quantum act, alter its reality? Perhaps it does.

I resist, though, specialisation - for now. There is always the tantalising promise of another writer, another book, another time period, another country. And, of course, re-re-re-reading those books whose contours and contents are both as familiar as my study, and yet somehow remain as strange as distant, unexplored mountains, on a far planet, visible, yet ever unreachable. The only thing, I suppose, is to keep doing it: and one day, those mountains might feel like home.

Philip Womack’s children’s novel, The Arrow of Apollo, was republished today by Wilton Square Books.