Are Rereadings Better Readings?
“One cannot read a book: one can only reread it,” Nabokov said. Book Bench contributor Nathaniel Stein thought of that line while reading “On Rereading,” Patricia Meyer Spacks’s charming and strange blend of memoir, literary criticism, and scientific treatise.
For Nabokov, another reading was always constructive. But for Spacks, rereading—though satisfying for pure literary analysis—can reveal unwelcome truths about our past selves, and cause disenchantment—in the most literal sense—with the books we used to love.
What books have you reread? Have you experienced re-readings as better readings? Tell us below or photo reply with an image of you with your most-read book.
The woman in the beginning of Oz the Great and Powerful that Michelle William’s plays says she is going to marry a man named John Gale. Which would make her Dorothy’s mother. Now if people in Oz are parallel to people in Kansas than that would mean that when Dorothy goes to Oz and meets Glinda she is also meeting a woman who looks just like her mother whom, as an orphan, she never met… and she doesn’t even realize it.
