Notes on rereading the same four books
I stopped chasing new titles two years ago. Here is what a decade of rereading gave back instead.
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There are four books I have read every year since 2022. Between them they run to about eleven hundred pages, and I could not give you a reliable summary of any of them.
That last part used to worry me. It does not now, and the reason is the most useful thing rereading has taught me: we do not remember books, we remember having read them, and those are entirely different possessions.
The second pass is where the sentences appear
On a first reading the plot is in the way. You are working out what happens, which uses most of the available attention, and the prose goes past almost unexamined. On a second pass the plot is spent and the sentences are suddenly visible, standing there as though they had been added since.
Teju Cole has the line about a book read twice being a different book. Nan Shepherd, whom I reread every spring, is the strongest case I know: The Living Mountain is a short book about walking in the Cairngorms that becomes, on about the fourth reading, a book about attention itself.
(I also reread a book about barn conversions annually, entirely by accident, because I keep forgetting I own it.)
Four books a year is a worse number than forty and a much better year of reading. I cannot summarise any of them, and I can quote all four.
