On Rereading as an Endangered Habit
There are so many books on the shelves and in our kindles that are waiting to be read. With such a wealth of options, do we still go back and read old favourites? There are some books that require more attention and patience than others, a slower pace. Some books often reveal more on a second read. Is it a habit that is dying out, and does it deserve to be preserved ?
Two months of staying at home and a quick glance at my to-read list shows me that it has kept growing larger, as has the panic that comes with it, at not having enough time to read all the books I want to, even with the time gained from cutting the daily commute. I can’t say I haven’t tried. I have picked up books and abandoned them 10 pages in; shuffling between them and trying to find something that strikes the right chord, until I go back to something I have known already; there is too much uncertainty to deal with.
To reread is perhaps, dare I say, a sinful self indulgence, like tucking into a second dessert. There is also the old trope — it’s nostalgic, even wishful. But I have made my peace; what once sparked joy is surely a lasting relationship. And so now, I wholeheartedly embrace this process for what it has become — therapy. Why shouldn’t I return to something good ?
On a hazy winter evening in my parents’ home in Delhi, a passing moment as the smog yawns when no one is watching, I am going through the only possessions I truly care about — my books. Books that I have lugged around cities, left in the care of, and then retrieved from reliable friends. I find some treasures I had long forgotten about, stacks of musty pages and my face lights up at the dog-eared books. To be again in the company of books I have dearly loved — the ones that have bent spines from repeated opening and closing, is like being in the company of an old friend. There is one for every season, for every rhyme and reason. Chronicles of a time gone.
This has become a yearly exercise that I partake in; the way some people go through old pictures. I find my thumbed copy of A hundred years of solitude, and curl down to read a paragraph I have marked, and suddenly five minutes have turned into five hours, it is midnight and I am a hundred pages deep. The story is a talisman and I’ve held it close to my heart, gifted to friends the most.
My copy of The unbearable lightness of being, that I have urged so many people to read, sits in a quiet corner between Marquez and Naipaul. On a forgotten row at the bottom lies the hard bound copy of Eldest, second in the Inheritance trilogy, that I had earned as a present on my 14th birthday. There are books read through raging summers, on quiet afternoons alone at home, on train journeys and at airports. There is a book on trees of Delhi, beloved purchase of my elder brother that marked his walks around town. Time slows down and in a sense, I’m taken back to the first encounter with these stories. I still remember the call I had made after putting down God of small things, in the midst of a stormy monsoon.
The affliction of reading books over and over again struck me early; it’s how I would procrastinate before important exams, immersing myself in text that I could trust, where I knew where the story was going, annotations abounded like bread crumbs along the way. Sometimes going back to books you know you loved as a child, helps you see a version of yourself you thought you had lost; you marvel at the childhood enchantment you traded for grown up literary seriousness. Often I will read some authors again because I want to capture some of their essence in my own writing, to try to mimic their rhythm as a way of finding my own. Doubtlessly, there are certain books that only reveal their ethos on a second or third read, especially the ones that dare to capture complex ideas in the face of brevity, that challenge you as a reader, whose brilliance you can only appreciate after going back.
If we look at our lives as a series of milestones and corners we have flagged, then I have perhaps mapped my life to books that I have come to associate with important moments. We are not entirely accessible to other people, just like how they remain inaccessible to us, no matter how many decades we’ve spent with them. Just like there are infinite ways to tell a story, there are multitudes of ways to approach the same and every time we come back to a story, our attitude to the characters in it is shaped by where we are in our own stories, an indication of how we’ve traveled through life ourselves, how our hearts and minds have changed.
There is solace in reading these books. It is time travel. When everything else has changed — the city, your house, the furniture, the people in your life — the pages, ever reliable, remain the same. They come to be an anchor through times of chaos, yoking the reader even in the middle of a turbulent sea. You seize them up when you’re ill or bored or moody or restless, in need of comfort.
© Snigdha Dagar 2020
