There is a wonderful essay by Richard Ford on rereading, “A Different Hunger,” from Eighteen Bridges, a new literary magazine published by Lynn Coady and Curtis Gillespie out of Edmonton.
Mostly we don’t have the time to reread books, of course. I know I don’t. … The point here (unsurprisingly) is that rereading a treasured and well-used book is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, … and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look.
The first issue of Eighteen Bridges is available on-line, and it’s full of riches, including a story by Lisa Moore.
Read an interview with Lynn Coady about her new venture here.
The whole of Ford’s essay is here.
