Same River, Same Man
I once admitted a fondness for The Catcher in the Rye, and somebody challenged me: “Read it again.” I was kind of offended. It was true I hadn’t read it in twenty-five years, but I read it twice in high school, at fifteen or sixteen, each time in the span of a day, and I remembered the feeling it gave me. This person was so confident I wouldn’t like the book anymore, as an adult. I was confident I would—yet, I was reluctant to do it. I often reread dog-eared and underlined passages from books, and I reread whole poems, because I never seem to remember poems, even my favorite poems, when I’m not reading them. But I rarely reread whole books, nonfiction or fiction. It doesn’t suit my constitution.
In his essay “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton describes a theory of “intensive” versus “extensive” reading attributed to historian Rolf Engelsing, who argued that people read “intensively” between the middle Ages and the eighteenth century: “They had only a few books—the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two—and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness,” Darnton writes. After that, supposedly, people started reading “extensively”: “They read all kinds of material, especially periodicals and newspapers, and read it only once.”
Engelsing, Darnton writes, “does not produce much evidence for this hypothesis.” But the model maps nicely to my own reading life. As a child I read intensively, the same few books over and over. They weren’t world-historical or holy texts, but standard-issue YA, Louis Sachar and Judy Blume; books I came upon randomly, at bookfairs and in the strip-mall second-hand bookstore my mother took me to, or in the back of Waldenbooks or B. Dalton. A few were hand-me-downs from my mother’s own childhood (like The Boxcar Children). It was partly an issue of access—I couldn’t drive to the library myself or just buy more books whenever I wanted. I also found it comforting. Those books, like a song on a jukebox, produced a reliable feeling. Abruptly, in college, I stopped rereading, maybe because I was surrounded by people who had read more than me.
Some people say rereading is the only reading, but sometimes I think first readings are the only rereading. This isn’t total nonsense. First readings are when I pay the most attention, do the most doubling back. They’re when I have the most capacity for shock and joy. When I reread I am always comparing my experience to my first impression, a constant distraction; I am tempted to skip and skim, to get along with it and verify my memories already, my belief that I
