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  • The Mysteries of Rereading
  • Dawn Potter (bio)
On Rereading by Patricia Meyer Spacks (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2011. 304 pages. $26.95)

Readers fall into two general but very uneven categories: those who read a book once and then rarely return to it and those who regularly reread. At least among adults this second category is far less common, and most of those who belong to it have some scholarly or pedagogical reason for revisiting books. Almost all "pure" rereaders—those insatiable consumers who crave stories like a drunk craves whiskey, who will finish a novel and then turn back to the beginning and read it straight through again—are children.

The author Patricia Meyer Spacks is no exception to the rule. A retired professor of English who has taught at institutions such as Wellesley, Yale, and the University of Virginia, she is without question a professional rereader. Yet on page 1 of On Rereading, a memoir of her deliberate project to reread a variety of books she had read at least once, she quotes one of those rare adult rereaders who has allowed himself to revert to a childlike companionship with books: "Consider Larry McMurtry, writing in his early seventies: 'If I once read for adventure, I now read for security. How nice to be able to return to what won't change.' McMurtry reports that publishers keep sending him new books to comment on. He sends them back, preferring the books he already knows. 'When I sit down at dinner with a given book,' McMurtry writes, 'I want to know what I'm going to find.'"

Spacks finds McMurtry's behavior appealing but unsatisfactory. To her his comment "suggests that a book reread offers what will not change— but for most rereaders, rereading provides, in contrast, an experience of repeated unexpected change." She seems, in this remark, to assume that McMurtry's preference for "know[ing] what I'm going to find" implies that he has a static relationship with what he reads. And that assumption, like her phrase for most rereaders, is telling; for Spacks almost entirely overlooks the existence of another small but important group of adult rereaders: people who reread because an intense nonanalytical relationship with a handful of books is essential to their own creative enterprises. This disconnect may seem subtle, but it influences nearly every element of this book—from the rereading project itself, to Spacks's analysis of her results, to the tone of her prose. Yet her gentle memoir has a great deal of charm, and the author is an appealing narrator who conveys on every page her deep, respectful, and abiding love for the way in which rereading affects our moral and emotional comprehension of the world. "Rereading," she notes, "is a way of paying attention. It takes books seriously and allows them to do their work: work that includes the changing of one's self and consequently of one's life, although in the nature of things we never quite glimpse the changes as they occur."

As one might expect from a longtime teacher, Spacks planned her project carefully. She chose books [End Page lxxix] such as L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz and Munro Leaf's The Tale of Ferdinand that she had loved as a child but had not read since. She revisited books such as Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Saul Bellow's Herzog that she had strongly liked or disliked as a young adult. She considered "guilty pleasures"—books she had formerly found herself reading for relaxation, such as P. G. Wodehouse's stories and novels. Usually she had read her chosen book just once before, or years had elapsed since her last rereading. Only occasionally does she discuss novels such as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice that she continues to reread regularly.

Since Spacks has already published scholarly works addressing many of the novels that might have fallen into this last category, her choice of books is logical, for it provides a fresh way to note how time and memory can distort or clarify our relationship to literature. But the methodical rationales she lays out for her choices, the...

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