On Re-Reading
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
I’m struggling to read as many real books as I used to, before a) the blogverse sucked me into its delicious tempting web and b) I had children.
Seriously, it’s hard to finish a novel when you have a 5 year old or a 9 month old physically lying/sitting on you, which pretty much describes my weekends. I used to be able to read while feeding Raeli when she was little, but Jem started looking around and trying to check out the book pretty early, so I usually plug in the iPod instead (though she also has a good line in yanking earbuds directly out of my ears, but that’s another story).
The thing which has really gone the way of the dodo in the last 5 years since motherhood struck is re-reading. I used to be a champion re-reader. I’m a super fast reader, and there were some books I would just re-read every year or two, since I discovered them. When I was pregnant with Raeli, I encountered a weird kind of ‘booksickness’ where I felt physically unable to read anything new or unknown. I descended instead into a deep reread cycle, making it through all my comfort essentials: the entire oeuvre of Tamora Pierce, Diana Wynne Jones, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Dorothy Sayers, Lindsey Davis, Janet Evanovich, and a few precious standalones: Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, Lee Tulloch’s Fabulous Nobodies.
And then, apparently, I was done. Because apart from the occasional Enid Blyton, I have pretty much stopped rereading books since Raeli was born.
I do think that part of it is age. The older you get, parenthood or not, the less spare time there is to indulge in a reread. Or, you know, forty rereads. Apart from the many other calls on the time and the fact that I am actually glued to my laptop for most of the day, there’s also the lure of new books. The blogverse doesn’t just take my time away by presenting so many interesting bite-sized bits of text for me to consume, it also informs me of new books that I long and pine for. It reviews and presents new books that I become desperate to read. More than that, I become desperate to read them now.
For me, the internet is one big conversation, and it does place a lot more urgency on the reading of this year’s books, right now. I used to wait until the Locus Recommended Reading List told me what I should have been reading, and then slowly hunt down the more accessible books, but now I can order instantly and oh yes, I often do. I love being the person that tells people about new books, and I also love talking about them while they are still “current,” that is when other people are also talking about them.
It’s one hell of a treadmill, but it’s also deliciously addictive.
This goes a long way towards explaining my to read shelf, which is pretty much divided into two shelves now - the exciting books, and the archived books. The exciting ones have been acquired quite recently, and I still have the buzz behind why I wanted to read them in the first place. The archived shelf is… well, it’s been a while. I tried putting coloured sticky labels on them each year to show which ones were still there after x number of years, but that was just depressing.
My experiment of two months not ordering/buying books (during which, thanks to my habit of pre-orders, books kept arriving in my postbox) only went to show how important it is to me that I read things NOW when I really want to read them. There were several books that felt just a bit agonising to have to wait for. Gail Carriger’s Soulless is one - I think I added it to my “books I would have bought if I was allowed to” list about three times over that two month period.
I’m not going to get back to re-reading any time soon.
It’s a shame, though. When I found out Colleen McCullough had written a new Men of Rome book (a year and a half ago) I ran out and bought it, so excited was I to receive another gift in this series that had been bringing me joy since my mid-teens. It is still sitting on my to-read shelf, not because I am any less excited by it, or because I am daunted by its massive size (okay, maybe a little of that) but because my old routine was to read every single one of those books published so far before I read a new one. And it feels wrong to just wander in to the most recent without doing the same. Even though I do not have four months of reading time to spare on that particular project!
The other day I seriously thought about a new experiment - a whole year of only re-reading books, with no new ones. Just briefly. I reacted to said thought with something akin to a Victorian fainting fit. No, not that. I just don’t think I’m ready to give up on a whole year’s worth of new.
Maybe when I’m retired.