There is a certain shame attached to rereading, as though books were a list to be cleared rather than rooms to be lived in. We keep tally of how many we have finished. We feel the unread spines on the shelf as a low, persistent reproach. To open one we have already closed feels almost like cheating — time spent on a thing whose ending we have spoiled for ourselves.
But I have come to think the second reading is the real one. The first time through, I am too busy finding out what happens to notice how it happens. I race the plot to its conclusion and arrive slightly out of breath, having missed nearly everything along the way. It is only on the return trip, when the destination is no longer in doubt, that I can afford to look out the window.
What changes the second time
A familiar book is a strange kind of mirror. The words on the page are fixed, but the person reading them is not, and the gap between who I was at the first reading and who I am now becomes visible in the margins. A passage I once underlined leaves me cold; a line I skimmed past entirely now seems to be the whole point. The book has not moved. I have.
There is comfort in it, too — the plain comfort of knowing where you are going. On a difficult week I do not want surprise. I want the chapter I have read a dozen times, the one where I already know the storm passes and the letter arrives and everyone, more or less, is alright in the end. It asks nothing of me but my attention, and gives back the small certainty that some things turn out the way I remember.
So I have stopped keeping score. The shelf of unread books will keep; it always does. Tonight I am going back to one I know by heart, to find out, again, what I missed.