The Books That Read Us Back
On rereading, and the strange experience of meeting your younger self in the margins.
There is a shelf in my apartment I think of as the rereading shelf. The books on it are not the best books I own. They are the ones that have, over the years, quietly read me back.
Marginalia
I am an underliner, a margin-scribbler, a folder of corners. It means that every reread is also an excavation. I find a sentence I marked at twenty and cannot now imagine why — and another I walked straight past that seems, today, to be the entire point of the book.
We do not read the same book twice, because we are not the same reader twice.
The second reading
A first reading is for the story. A second reading is for everything the story was carrying while you were busy following it. The plot stops being suspense and becomes architecture; you start to see how the rooms connect.
It is the closest thing I know to time travel — not forward, and not quite back, but sideways, into the company of the person you used to be.