It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst's couch.
--Vivian Gornick, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
Happy National Reread a Book Day!
What, you didn't know that September 13 is Reread a Book Day? Well, it isn't... not officially, not yet. I just made it up after reading Oscar Schwartz's recent Paris Review essay, "Against Rereading."
"The correct and virtuous way to read, according to those who knew about reading and writing, was to reread," Schwartz observes. "Rereading was that which separated the real reader from the average book consumer.... This disinclination to reread the books I treasure alienates me not just from Nabokov, but from a vast pro-rereading discourse espoused by geniuses who regard rereading as the literary activity par excellence."
I disagree, of course, but the article did inspire me to launch Reread a Book Day, which happens to occur just a week after Read a Book Day (September 6) and Buy a Book Day (September 7).
"This is a big weekend!" Rhythm and Co. Books, Glen Rose, Tex., posted on social media last Friday. "Today is Read a Book Day! Tomorrow is Buy a Book Day! Does that seem backwards to you? Then Sunday is Grandparents Day! What better way to spend that day than reading with those special family members? Or working a puzzle? Either way we've got you covered."
Other bookshops marking Buy a Book Day included the Lynx bookstore, Gainesville, Fla. ("Happy National Buy a Book Day to all who celebrate."); A Book Place Boutique, Riverhead, N.Y. (Treat your shelf for #nationalbuyabookday.... We love what we do and couldn't be happier sharing in your reading journey."), and Bazoo Books, Sedalia, Mo. ("Come celebrate National Buy A Book Day with us!)."
For National Read a Book Day, Whitelam Books, Reading, Mass., posted: "Happy National Read A Book Day from Harriet, Staci, and the whole Whitelam Flock! We hope you get to celebrate this very excellent day with a good book!" The Books Inc. Opera Plaza store, San Francisco, Calif., called it "a great day to celebrate readers, writers, and all lovers of words"; and Schuler Books, which has four stores in Michigan, posted: "It's National Read a Book Day! Our favorite kind of self-care. For a book lover, this is basically like any other day but it's fun to celebrate nonetheless. Plan a little time to read a book (or at least a few chapters) in your favorite reading spot today!... Happy reading!"
So why not add National Reread a Book Day to the mix? In 2021, during the height of the Covid pandemic, the Reading Agency released a survey that revealed 35% of respondents found happiness in re-reading books, while 53% had re-read at least one book in the previous 12 months.
In Unfinished Business, Gornick recalls it was when she went to college "that I began re-reading, because from then on it was to the books that had become my intimates that I would turn and turn again, not only for the transporting pleasure of the story itself but also to understand what I was living through, and what I was to make of it.... 'How often have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, 'If I had met you at any other time'… It's the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness."
Gornick shares thoughts on her long reading relationship with J.L. Carr's 1980 novel A Month in the Country: "Sometimes I shiver when I think that I might not have re-read [the novel]... and then I shiver some more thinking of all the good books I wasn't in the mood to take in the first time I read them, and never went back to."
As it happens, my own weathered, nearly 25-year-old NYRB Classics ARC of A Month in the Country is a book I often reread, most recently this past June. Time passing is the soul of the story, in which an old man, Tom Birkin, gazes back half a century, with longing and regret, to a golden summer in 1920 when he was hired to uncover a parish church's medieval wall painting in Oxgodby, a small Yorkshire village.
Shell-shocked from his experiences in the trenches during WWI, young Birkin's gradual healing process includes a subtle and compelling friendship, edging tentatively toward love, with the vicar's beautiful young wife. He later recalls (rereads?) this as "the missed moment" of his life.
In Carr's foreword to the novel, he addressed the mystery of time for a writer, though the theory could apply equally to a (re)reader: "Then, again, during the months whilst one is writing about the past, a story is colored by what presently is happening to its writer. So, imperceptibly, the tone of voice changes, original intentions slip away. And I found myself looking through another window at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the past."
Or, as author Hilary Mantel once put it: "You have to find out by experience what everyone tells you: that a good book is never the same twice. Rereading is a pleasure and duty of middle age, and illuminating, even if it only sheds light on how you yourself have changed."
So, happy inaugural Reread a Book Day! You know what to do.
--Robert Gray , contributing editor