We've mentioned the incomparable pleasures of re-reading here before, but lately I've been intrigued by another book habit you'll probably recognize and understand. Let's call it the art of "rerouting," which happens when you are fully engaged with a great book and then discover--after, during or, in one recent case for me, before--reading it that you have been sent in unanticipated new directions.
For example, earlier this winter I read Pico Iyer's The Man Within My Head, a brilliant meditation on how years of reading Graham Greene affected the author's own life and work. When I finished, I was naturally rerouted to Greene himself and bought Orient Express, one of the few titles I'd not read before. I also pulled Shirley Hazzard's Greene on Capri from my bookshelves, and now I'm in the middle of one of Iyer's earlier works, The Lady and the Monk.
Rerouting happened again last week when I started Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, a book I probably never would have read had I not been so intrigued by Adam Johnson's novel The Orphan Master's Son.
Then there is Geoff Dyer's Zona, an extraordinary meditation on Alexander Tarkovsy's classic film Stalker. With this one I was advised to follow an alternate route and watch the movie before reading the book, since Dyer offers a scene-by-scene re-creation, accompanied by irresistibly Dyer-esque commentary.
And what about Teju Cole's Open City? This book not only rerouted me to Mahler's Ninth Symphony and a return trip to the wonders of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, it also literally altered the way I walk the streets of Manhattan now.
You just never know where a great book will lead you. So many routes, so little time. -- Robert Gray, contributing editor, Shelf Awareness