Calvino writes in “Why Read the Classics” that
there ought to be a time in one’s adult life which is dedicated to rediscovering the most important readings of our youth.
I have often said that education is wasted on the young, which is just a cranky way of saying that it would love to go back to the books that were read to me as a child, to the books I read in school and university and do it all again, knowing what I know now and being able to bring to the second take all the layers of experience that I now can.
By making reading to my children a delicious daily priority, I get to have that second take with the books from my childhood. I am rereading books and reading for the first time books I never got around to but that form part of the collective unconscious of our literary heritage. It has been wonderful to bring it all back to the surface again, to have crisp images of the characters and their stories instead of the hazy blobs that dwelled on the blurred edges of memory.
As for the great books of my undergraduate years, for the past year, I’ve had lines from Paradise Lost rattling around in my head, so Milton will be on my rereading list this fall.
No more “pale ire, envy and despair” in the face of too many books and too little time.
What’s on your re-reading list?
Nathalie Foy 
Lovely Paradise Lost! It’s excellent value for a reread. 🙂 I reread it myself earlier this year and was even more blown away by it than when I did it in college.
I keep thinking I should find a Milton read-along somewhere!
1001 Arabian nights is on my bedside table on the moment. I am slowly working my way through it. For some reason I am drawn to it. My son is eight and loves all the books that includes all those words that boys love. I wouldn’t call them classics more popular fiction amongst his age group. Charmaine
What a great choice for a bedside book! Are you deliberately pacing yourself so that it’s only one or two stories a night?
I have gotten so much out of rereading, Nathalie. I’ve been on a rereading jag. In fact, last winter I reread The Confessions of Nat Turner twice and reviewed it. I’ve read This Boy’s Life several times. And recently I read a novel about wild ducks (three main characters: two drakes battling over a hen!) and their migrations, travails, and nesting that I loved as a kid and it held up well, though the one thing I remembered about it was less vivid in the book than what I had in my head.
Thanks so much for stopping by, Richard. I am new to and love your blog. (And just realising tht I must add it to the blogroll.) I am always so thrilled to see such consistently thoughtful and weighty content.
Isn’t it funny how some moments in books stand out in more relief in memory, or the hearsay that poor memory becomes, than in fact? When I read _The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_ to the boys, I was astounded by how slight Aslan was on the page. I remembered more pomp and circumstance.
Especially after having read _The Possessed_, I think I need to go back and re-read some Dostoevsky. I read _Crime and Punishment_ during my first undergraduate term (it was lost on me) and _The Adolescent_ early on in my bookselling career (the experience still gives me nightmares), but I think I’d be a more receptive audience now. I have _The Idiot_, _The Demons_ and _The Brothers Karamazov_ on my shelf (talk about book-buying out of control – this when I don’t even LIKE Dostoevsky) for the exact right moment. Which should be soon, I think.
I keep picking up _The Possessed_ and then putting it back down. Not sure what on earth the resistance is, and it’s right up my alley, but I just haven’t made the leap into it. I suspect that in large part it’s because I was never a big fan of the Russian doorstops. It’s funny your weakness for buying all those novels even though you don’t like him–the collector’s impulse. My impulse buying tends to be what’s current, but then of course they pile up and the books are in paperback before I even get around to half of them. (I’m looking at you, _Waiting for Columbus_. Why?! Give a girl a background in post-colonial theory, and she has to jump on a rewriting of contact literature, but then she stays up waaaaay too late reading _The Hunger Games_ ….)