Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love [Hardcover]

Anne Fadiman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 25, 2005

Is a book the same book-or a reader the same reader-the second time around? The seventeen authors in this witty and poignant collection of essays all agree on the answer: Never.

The editor of Rereadings is Anne Fadiman, and readers of her bestselling book Ex Libris (FSG, 1998) will find this volume especially satisfying. Her chosen authors include Sven Birkerts, Allegra Goodman, Vivian Gornick, Patricia Hampl, Phillip Lopate, and Luc Sante; the objects of their literary affections range from Pride and Prejudice to Sue Barton, Student Nurse. Each has selected a book or a story or a poem--or even, in one case, the lyrics on the back of the Sgt. Pepper album--that made a deep impression in his or her youth, and reread it to see how it has changed in the interim. (Of course, what has really changed is the reader.)

These essays are not conventional literary criticism; they are about relationships. The relationship between reader and book is a powerful one, and as these writers attest, it evolves over time. Rereadings reveals at least as much about the reader as about the book: each is a miniature memoir that focuses on that most interesting of topics, the protean nature of love. And as every bibliophile knows, no love is more life-changing than the love of a book.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former American Scholar editor Fadiman (Ex Libris) has drawn from a column in that journal for a charming collections of essays on the varied ways book lovers read. The best of these entries—Arthur Krystal's return to H.C. Witwer's boxing novel, The Leather Pushers; Dianna Kappel-Smith's assessment of the field guide that stirred an interest in the natural world; Michael Upchurch's consideration of Christina Stead's fictional financial world—are written by masters of the essay form, revealing themselves at the different phases of their lives through the act of reading. All of the writers share a gratitude for the books that helped them navigate their lives, especially over the rocky shoals of adolescence. The return to beloved works is not always simple, especially when readers come to see the faults in books that they so closely identified with years earlier. As many note, the act of reading changes over the course of a lifetime, from an easy engagement with plot and character to an awareness of politics and style. They may bemoan their own loss of literary innocence, but each finds a new way to appreciate the texts that have accompanied them through life. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As demonstrated in Ex Libris (1998), Fadiman is a superb literary essayist with a great appreciation for the art of reading. As editor of American Scholar, she has encouraged similarly incisive musings in a feature titled "Rereadings," which was inspired by her experience reading a childhood favorite of her own to her son. Fadiman got to thinking about how books beloved in one's youth read differently in one's maturity. This theme generates juicy and satisfying blends of fluent literary criticism and rueful memoir as 17 writers revisit works that left them thunderstruck at a tender age and now lead them to confront their younger selves. Luc Sante reconsiders Rimbaud, Vivian Gornick rereads Colette, Allegra Goodman returns to Austen. In one of the finest pieces, Patricia Hampl offers a brilliant portrait of Katharine Mansfield and of the woman who introduced Hampl to the only writer Virginia Woolf viewed as a rival. And Sven Birkerts, in remembering his mother's fascination with Knut Hamsun and his own quaking response to Pan, offers the perfect description of the unending pleasure of books: "time spent in a vivid elsewhere." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (August 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374249423
• ISBN-13: 978-0374249427
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #464,216 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anne Fadiman is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale. Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, is an account of the unbridgeable gulf between a family of Hmong refugees and their American doctors. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, among other awards. Fadiman is also the author of two essay collections. The London Observer called Ex Libris "witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written." NPR said of At Large and At Small, "Fadiman is utterly delightful, witty and curious, and she's such a stellar writer that if she wrote about pencil shavings, you'd read it aloud to all your friends."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fadiman and friends invite us to revisit old book-friends in this enjoyable collection, January 21, 2006

By 

Magic Man (Brigadoon) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love (Hardcover)

In this collection of essays, Anne Fadiman (author of the delicious Ex Libris and the excellent The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down) and 17 other authors revisit books that affected them in earlier years.

In the foreword, Fadiman tells of reading The Horse and His Boy (from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia) aloud to her young son and how differently she experienced the book from when she read it as a child. She goes on to make a compelling case for rereading in general. "If a book read when young is a lover, that same book, reread later on, is a friend...This may sound like a demotion, but after all, it is old friends, not old lovers, to whom you are most likely to turn when you need comfort."

The rest of the essays are part memoir and part literary criticism. Of the 18 books (I say books, even though one is a poem and one is an album cover), I've read only two. That mattered more for the essays that leaned more heavily towards criticism, but for the most part, the only prerequisite is an interest in books.

A particularly powerful essay is Diana Kappel Smith's review of a field guide to wildflowers, in which I read (with some envy) how the right book can wonderfully determine an entire life trajectory. My other favorites were Arthur Krystal's essay on an early 20th century boxing book and Katherine Ashenburg's essay on a series of books about a nurse, written for young readers in the 1940s and 50s.

Ultimately, it was impossible to read this book without reflecting on the books that affected me as a youth and wondering how they would affect me now. (How would the passionate activism in Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang or in Alice Walker's Possessing the Secret of Joy strike me today?) It may be time to visit some old friends.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Facets of writers; reflections of books seen in different lights, March 2, 2006

By 

Harry P. Travis - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love (Hardcover)

This volume has so little in common with collected interpretations, scholarly or chatty, of single literary works or authors. Nor do the (mostly) books written about suffer the sameness and burden of being "most influential" for the writers. Editor Anne Fadiman brilliantly introduces the act of self-revelation accomplished by passing books through prisms of innocence and then of experience and writing about the display. Whether or not you recognize the writers and the works they are responding to when re-engaged, you will find the essays express the potential of authors, books, and ideas to stain and define the slides of self-image within readers. Bad metaphor, that: happily, the essays all want for clinical dryness and laboratory precision; and scholarship has little role here but to entertain.

Everyting about this book, including the printing and hand feel (and not least the crazy-cheap Amazon price) led me to splurge on copies for friends. "Rereadings" is a book to give when you would feel self-conscious about a volume of poetry; when a jumble of psychobable or confessional would be embarass giver or recipient or both; and the burden of plowing through 500+ pages of popular history, biography, or memoir would be, well, doubly burdensome.

This book would be a find if just 5 of the essays furnished a total of an hour of instruction and delight. Be prepared to be surprised and engaged by a dozen more than that. And don't wait for the paperback. You'll want to share this one.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tribute to any book lover, January 6, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love (Hardcover)

Is the same book viewed the same way on a second reading? Seventeen authors provide a collection of essays to demonstrate re-readings are never the same as the first reading. Authors range from Patricia Hampl to Luc Sante, and their subjects from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to a science field guide; so the diversity of genre is especially vivid and useful in demonstrating the power and insight of the re-reading. The first-person insights show how rereadings contribute to new perceptions and provide added enjoyment and even new details. A tribute to any book lover who has read a favorite a second or third time and discovered new meaning between the same pages.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch