I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read, a third reader says, but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new...
Rereading, we find a new book
A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
The reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
And there lay the essential differences between reading and rereading, acts that Henry and I were preforming simultaneously. The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut ou...
The problem with being ravished by books at an early age is that later rereadings are often likely to disappoint. The sharp luscious flavor, the fine is fled, Hazlitt wrote, and nothing but the stalk...
One of the strongest motivations for rereading is purely selfish: it helps you remember what you used to be like. Open an old paperback, spangled with marginalia in a handwriting you outgrew long ago,...