I am two hundred pages into a book I have read three times, and I am reading a different book. This is well known and I still find it strange every time.
The first reading, at twenty-two, was about the plot. I remember racing. The second, at thirty, was about the prose — I remember stopping constantly, which annoyed the person I was living with. The third, at thirty-six, was about one minor character whose situation had become, in the interval, extremely relevant to me, and who I had not remembered existed.
This fourth one is about the structure. I can see the machinery now — where the writer sets something up two hundred pages before she needs it, where a scene exists only to make a later scene survivable. It’s a bit like being shown the back of a stage set, and I had assumed it would spoil things and it hasn’t at all.
The uncomfortable part
If the book changes every time, then what I loved at twenty-two is not what I love now, and the continuity I feel with my twenty-two-year-old self on the basis of a shared favourite book is mostly an illusion. We have a title in common. We do not have a book in common.
I find this genuinely disorienting and I notice I want to argue my way out of it. The best counter-argument I have is that the object didn’t change, so something is being held constant, and the something is real even if my experience of it isn’t. But that’s a bit thin. It amounts to saying: we’re both looking at the same wall, in different weather, from different distances, and one of us is looking at a different part of it.
Why do it anyway
A friend who rereads far more than I do says she does it to take her own temperature — the book is fixed, so any difference is information about her. That’s the clearest defence I’ve heard and it’s the reason I’ve kept going with this one.
What it’s telling me this time is that I have become much more interested in how things are made and much less patient with how they feel, and I am not yet sure whether that is craft or armour.
You cannot step in the same river twice, but you can absolutely check whether the river has noticed.