My teeming brain

I’m the kind of reader who always has a hefty stack of books on the go. I know that doesn’t make me unusual—I have many friends with overflowing bedside tables. My pile, however,  is generally not composed only of new (or new-to-me) titles. It also includes books I’m reading for the second or third time. I guess this makes me a “rereader”, and it’s one reason my bookshelves (physical and digital) aren’t more crowded than they are. This post is all about my compulsion to plunge back into familiar literary territory—why I enjoy it and what moves me to do it. 

From what I’ve observed over the years, being a habitual rereader isn’t that common. Many people seek novelty in novels—as in a fresh perspective by a new author. Others seek recency—as in the most recent release by a favourite author. Whatever the case may be, these readers are typically intent on covering new terrain instead of doubling back over previously travelled territory. 

I’m continually adding new authors and titles to my reading list. I’m certainly not immune to the attractions of novelty. But unlike many avid readers of my acquaintance, I also return to novels for a second, third, and fourth experience. 

Why do I do it? It might be connected to my background as an English lit student and then a university lecturer. There were texts I had to read and reread to write essays, seminar presentations, and, later, class lectures. But I’m pretty sure my education is only a small part of my inclination, and there are stronger driving factors. Sometimes I’m prompted to pick up a book again by a conversation with a friend, a display in a bookstore, or a mention in the media. Other times it’s a whimsical impulse: a book spine on my shelf catches my eye, or a random thought gets me thumbing through pages looking for a half-remembered scene. 

Whatever the initial impulse may be, I’m seeking a kind of familiarity, not novelty. And with that familiarity comes comfort—a big factor for me, as I’ll try to explain. Sometimes we just know what we want from a read, and there’s a comfort in getting it. It may be an author’s unique style, or it may be the tone or sensibility of an era. There can even be a special pleasure in knowing how the story ends. I don’t always want to turn the page just to find out what happens next. Taking suspense out of the equation lets you focus on other aspects of the reading experience: the author’s voice; how they constructed the narrative; and how they work within or challenge cultural traditions. 

There are times in my life when I need a book to envelop me and insulate me from my surroundings for a while. In another post, I wrote about how I’ve found peace following a cancer diagnosis. Part of that journey has involved choosing activities that brought me pleasure in the present moment instead of an uncertain and scary future. Such as reading. Instinctively, at a time where I was feeling overwhelmed by uncertainty, I turned to books that I considered old friends, including Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. I’ve read them all many times in my life, for school, work, and leisure, so I knew quite well how each would transport me back into landscapes lost in time while also throwing me among casts of well-known characters. There was real pleasure in going to my bookshelves, running my index finger along rows of books, and choosing these titles. And there was joy in plunging into these stories and distracting myself from the stress and confusion I was experiencing. 

There was something else going on too. At a time that felt so momentous, I needed reading material that could help me bear the weight of the moment. I had a stack of contemporary fiction at hand, including a few book prize shortlisters, a couple of best sellers, and some finds from my local bookstore’s remaindered table. But I felt like the moment required reading that produced a stronger emotional connection. It wasn’t a time for novelty but instead for reassuring intimacy. 

I’ve been focusing on the comfort in familiarity, but there is another important aspect of the pleasure of rereading: surprise. I’m not so much talking about being surprised about what happens (the promise of suspense), although that can be part of it. I’m more interested in the surprising pleasure of re-experiencing how the author tells their story.   

On the issue of “what happens”: I don’t know what it’s like for the rest of you, but my memory doesn’t retain the details of a novel-length plot. While I might retain the broad arc of the narrative, a memory of specific scenes, and a sense of the author’s voice, I forget the rest. This may be a particular weakness of mine, but I think it’s something we all experience to different degrees.  

The limitations of my memory were clear in my recent rereading. For example, I’ve read Great Expectations at least five times in my life, and I still forgot the mystery surrounding the parents of Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella. Similarly, I’ve read Jane Eyre beginning-to-end at least three times before and didn’t retain Jane’s revealed relationship with the Rivers family who take her in when she flees Thornfield Hall. With Far from the Madding Crowd, I couldn’t recall the fate of Mr. Boldwood, who descends into a mad, obsessive passion for the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. I carried this suspense until the novel’s final pages. 

All this to say that memory is imperfect, which means rereading does include the pleasure of suspense. My delight in rereading, however, is so much more than rediscovering “what happened”; the plot is only one part of the reading experience. It’s also about appreciating the writer’s craft. When I think back to the novels I recently reread, those experiences were filled with many small revelations that collectively reconfirmed the value of returning to these stories. 

It would be impossible, not to mention boring, to dive deeply into these books for examples of how they continue to surprise me, but there are things I could mention. With Great Expectations, it’s the depiction of the coastal marshes of Kent that opens the novel. Dickens, drawing on an environment he knew well from his own childhood, conjures a flat, wet, windy world that seems to exist in a perpetual semi-darkness of fog and rain. Here is the churchyard where Pip first meets his convict as well as Joe Gargery’s forge. (Dickens is a master of conjuring quaint, cosy domestic environments for his humble characters that offer shelter from the elements, and Joe’s forge in this otherwise bleak environment is one shining example.) As Pip comes into his great expectations as a gentleman and turns his back on his roots, the marshes and the forge become a sort of remonstrance for all that he has turned his back on.

The Kentish marshes are just one of many vividly represented settings in Great Expectations that fuel the pleasure of reading and rereading. There is also Miss Havisham’s crumbling mansion, Satis House, frozen in time and enveloped in darkness and decay; the vicinity of Newgate Prison and Mr. Jaggers’ law offices in London; and Mr. Wemmick’s miniature domestic castle with its moat and battlements. But for me, the most vivid location of all is the Thames that flows through the novel, from beginning to end. The river provides a near-continual backdrop to the novel that goes well beyond establishing setting and ambiance to suggest the relentless flow of the story to its preordained conclusion. I particularly love the late scenes of the fugitive Magwich’s attempted escape via the river, with the cat-and-mouse concealment along the estuary’s marshy, sparsely populated shoreline, the pursuit on the open water, and the violent impact at the novel’s climax. It’s a writerly tour de force that bears rereading to fully appreciate the Victorian master’s densely descriptive and sensationally suspenseful narrative style. 

Revisiting Bronte’s bildungsroman about the quiet but fiercely independent Jane Eyre provided some surprising pleasures similar to what I experienced with Great Expectations. For example, there are the imaginative landscapes—in this case an often cold and bleak northern England. As Dickens did with Great Expectations, Bronte sets her novel back in the early 19th century, before the railroads transformed travel, trade, and Victorians’ conceptions of time and distance. As a result, in both novels the protagonists undertake long stagecoach rides across wide stretches of the country, and both authors offer rich descriptions of the experiences. The child Jane undertakes a long journey from her unhappy childhood home to the distant school for orphans to which she is banished by her aunt. And when the adult Jane flees Thornfield Hall, she almost blindly boards a stagecoach that eventually dumps her in a remote, barren moor in Yorkshire where she must seek shelter or die. Bronte brings vividly to life the experience of traversing these landscapes lost in time, and it’s part of my particular pleasure in reading the novel. 

For me, an even greater pleasure of rereading Jane Eyre rests in the way the eponymous heroine creates for herself a life of meaning and value in the face of all the obstacles, social and otherwise, she faces. Abandoned by her family at the austere and sometimes cruel Lowood School for girls, Jane adapts, survives, and obtains the education that will be the foundation of her independence as a single, middle-class woman. When she later arrives at Thornfield Hall as a governess, she overcomes the humiliating aspects of her role in the household as a sort of upper servant and wins the love of the taciturn but passionate Mr. Rochester through her quiet but firm adherence to her values and her sense of self. That same strength sustains her throughout her sojourn teaching at a remote village school in the moors. Bronte navigates the obstacles and challenges facing an educated, single, independent woman in this period through a narrative that blends some striking social realism with more traditional Romantic and Gothic literary conventions. It’s fascinating to see where Jane challenges mainstream Victorian conceptions of femininity and where she conforms to and reinforces the social expectations of the period. 

With Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the Victorian setting and landscape are again a huge part of my pleasure in rereading the novel. What I love about this story is the way it sets its limited cast of characters against a rural backdrop that can seem timeless with its fields and moors. 

Rereading Far from the Madding Crowd allowed me to continue my imaginative retreat to Victorian landscapes and to simpler ways of life. I think I picked up this book based on the promise of a simple but compelling love story told against the compelling backdrop of Hardy’s rural Wessex, a stand-in for his native Dorset. I was remembering a sort of pastoral idyll, which, despite plenty of conflict in the story of Bathsheba Everdene and her three lovers, resolved to a happy conclusion. In fact, the world Hardy describes is richer and more complex than my memory allowed for. The landscape, while beautiful, is also harsh and unforgiving and requires constant toil of its inhabitants. A herd or a harvest can be lost in a day and with it a character’s livelihood and independence. We see this in the protagonist Gabriel Oak’s quick descent from farmer to penniless and itinerant shepherd. His eventual return to prosperity is the result of ceaseless effort and perseverance. The element of social realism in Hardy’s work is evident in his depiction of rural life. 

It’s also evident in the treatment of Bathsheba Everdene, whose growth from vain, impulsive girl to mature, reflective woman the novel traces. While Gabriel Oak’s transformation from callow youth to respected community leader is a primary trajectory of the novel, Bathsheba’s evolution from dependent girl to manager of a large farm to wife of an errant husband is equally compelling. She takes on the management of the farm courageously and asserts her role in this male-dominated world of rural rustics. At the same time, she subscribes to ideas about love and desire that end up shackling her in undesirable relationships with abusive men. You can see Hardy exploring women’s power and agency in the world he lives in and describes, and of course he is caught up in and limited by the legal thinking and social mores of the period. So, while I was attracted to the escapist promise and classic comic resolution (i.e. marriage) of this novel, I was surprised and delighted by the nuanced picture of a vanishing world. 

I started this post with the idea of  trying to explain my pleasure in rereading, and how rediscovering familiar/forgotten books has been especially comforting for me in times of stress and anxiety. From there I sort of digressed to describing things that surprised and delighted me most in a few books I’ve recently reread, and I ask your forgiveness, dear reader, if my observations strike you as somewhat random; they’re both intensely personal and rather unprocessed. I’ll close this post by returning to generalizations and offering encouragement for those tempted by the pleasures of rereading: Rediscovering a book is an opportunity to slow down, revisit past experiences with fresh eyes, remind yourself of what you know and what you don’t, find the unexpected in the familiar, and rediscover joy in old literary friendships. We spend so much of our lives focused on what’s new and unfamiliar. There are times in our lives when we can all benefit from going back to what we think we know and discovering something  unexpected, moving and new.