Rereading is not nostalgia

Four books come off the shelf most years. They are not my favourites exactly — favourite is the wrong category — they are the ones where I have noticed that the reading keeps changing while the text stays put.

The objection

There are more good books than anyone can read, so rereading is spending scarce attention on a known quantity. I think this is right about the arithmetic and wrong about what reading is for.

A first read is largely comprehension: following the argument, holding the shape, finding out what happens. The things underneath — how it is built, where it cheats, which claim everything else rests on — are mostly invisible while you are still working out the plot.

The second read is the first one where I am not busy finding out what the book says, and can start noticing how it says it.

What changes on a reread

• The parts I remembered as central are frequently three paragraphs long. Memory enlarges whatever happened to be useful at the time.
• The weak passage becomes visible. On a first read it slid past as a transition; on a third it is clearly the join where the argument was forced.
• My disagreements change, and they change in the direction of my own experience rather than anything in the text.

The real reason

A reread is the only reliable measurement I have of how I have changed. The book is a fixed instrument. If my reading of a page I have read four times is different again, the difference is entirely me, and there is no other way I know of to see that directly.

Which is the opposite of nostalgia. Nostalgia wants the experience to repeat. Rereading is interesting precisely because it refuses to.