In the P.S. section of the US edition of
Taming the Beast there is a short essay about my obsession with
Jane Eyre, which I reread every year. The other book I have re-read annually since my mid-teens is
The Great Gatsby.
Depending on what is going on in my life I switch between identifying with Nick, Daisy, Gatsby and, one awful year, Myrtle Wilson. The first half-dozen readings I was absorbed by the story itself, tearing through to reach the gory hit-and-run, George Wilson's fatal grief and Gatsby floating on the swimming pool. Around the seventh read I began to notice the lightness and precision of the language and the faultless construction. Having read it more than a dozen times I'm still not really sure whether it is warning, consolation or inspiration. I'll probably never know for sure.
Re-reading a beloved book can be risky. Last year, wanting a comfort read, I picked up Anne of Green Gables. Reading it as a child I remember being upset by Matthew's death ? I may even have shed a tear ? but I was not inconsolable as I had been when Charlotte died in Charlotte's Web. So I was unprepared for how deeply the death affected me this time around. I realised that far from the shocking event I had believed it to be as a child, Matthew's death was ordinary and as inevitable as the death of my own grandparents. The deeply personal grief I felt was directly connected to my adult awareness of the mortality of those I love.
Another risk of rereading a childhood favourite is discovering the plot is contrived, the prose purple, the tone didactic or the ideas offensive. For this reason, I wish I'd never reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Peter Pan. Both had long held a place in my mind as Great Books and I feel betrayed to discover that they are not that at all. Perhaps in another twenty years I will try again ? who knows how I will feel about them then?
At twenty I hated Madame Bovary, except for the ending which I felt was just. I was newly-wed and thought Emma deserved everything she got for treating her husband with such contempt. Six years later I was forced to reread it for a university course and could hardly believe it was the same book. Emma Bovary was, I saw now, a passionate but naïve young woman caught in the gap between fantasy and reality. When a fellow student called Emma a 'spoiled tart,' I was reminded of the sanctimonious young bride I had been. I felt confident, suddenly, that I would never succumb to nostalgia or hubris. If I could change my opinion of Madame Bovary so much in six years, imagine all of the things I may understand or believe before my reading life is through.