Robert J. Sawyer, Hominids

Anyone who's read my blog for any stretch of time knows that one of my guilty pleasures in reading is a good sci-fi novel (that, and noir fiction, are my biggest guilty pleasures!). Sawyer's Hominids is a Hugo Award winner and Part One of the "Neanderthal Parallax," a trilogy that envisions a parallel universe in which Neanderthals became the dominant species on Earth.

Ponter Boddit is a Neanderthal physicist who, with the help of his partner Adikor, accidentally breaks into a parallel universe: ours. He fortunately befriends a small group of human physicists who work furiously to first communicate with him, then help him fight off his first bout of disease from human contact, and finally reconnect with his Neanderthal world. In alternating chapters we see Adikor as he is mistakenly accused of murdering Ponter (since Ponter's disappearance cannot be explained any other way in their world), and how he fights to establish his innocence within their legal system while also trying to reconnect with Ponter.

The pacing of this story is excellent thanks to Sawyer's use of alternating chapters to tell the parallel narratives, and (as good science fiction always does) it offers a certain amount of social commentary. Sawyer does this in two ways, by (a) providing a character from outside our world who comments on our way of life, and (b) providing a glimpse of how our world could have turned out under different circumstances, with less-than-satisfying results. Many science-fiction authors choose to use one narrative method or the other, but here Sawyer deftly juxtaposes the two, making for a gripping story that also has a lot to say.

If you are looking for some good sci-fi, look for further. Check out Hominids!

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

I read this on the recommendation of a fellow A.P. English teacher who likened it to a modern-day version of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I remember enjoying Anderson back in college, so I figured I'd give this book a whirl. It did NOT disappoint!

Strout's book is a collection of basically thirteen short stories, all pertaining to various residents of the small town of Crosby, Maine and all connected somehow by the titular character. Olive is a retired middle-school mathematics teacher, a big woman who loves her Dunkin' Donuts and speaking her mind plainly, and throughout the collection of stories we see Olive and a cast of others going about the activities of life: attending weddings and funerals, working unfulfilling jobs, engaging with soul mates, fretting over in-laws, fending regrets. Olive is the unifying element within each story, since most of the stories focus on other characters or families ... but by book's end you get a poignant portrait of this woman as she -- like all of us -- attempts to make sense of this thing called Life.

Olive Kitteridge is in beautifully written prose, yet I cannot help but wonder if a high school kid will really "get" what makes these characters work. In much the same way I tried to teach Dickens's A Christmas Carol a few years ago and learned, by the end, that the reason why I was the only one with tears in his eyes was because I, unlike the average seventeen-year-old, had actually lived life long enough to have regrets -- in this way, I doubt my students will really understand what makes these characters work. Nevertheless, each story is an outstanding exercise in characterization, so it's definitely worth a try.

Enjoy reading Olive Kitteridge!

David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

Imagine what it must feel like to have your last wish granted: to be reincarnated into, say, a horse. And as your body metamorphoses into this majestic beast, you realize the error of your choice as you lose forever that last glimmer of recognition of your humanness.

Better yet: What if God were an entity whose favorite activity is rereading Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein? Or what if "God" were, in reality, a population of dim-witted creatures and, upon our death, we learn that we are a population of Super Computers designed by them to provide answers to the cosmic questions ... but we don't know what they're asking, and they can't fathom what we're saying to them.

These are just some of the fascinating scenarios Eagleman puts forth in this thin volume of tales. Drawing from a divergent collection of disciplines like molecular biology, neuroscience, chemistry, mathematics -- and viewed through the prisms of theology, literature, and philosophical speculation -- Eagleman's Forty Tales offers the reader, in forty two- to three-page "tales," an entertaining and thought-provoking glimpse of what may await us in the Hereafter.

I enjoyed this!

Zev Chafets, Cooperstown Confidential: Heroes, Rogues, and the Inside Story of the Baseball Hall of Fame

For anyone who enjoys baseball, you know that the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York is the ultimate shrine to the nation's pastime (other than Fenway Park, of course ... but that's another story).

Cooperstown is synonymous with baseball -- its origins, its memorabilia, its timelessness. It's a small, quiet town in the middle of upstate New York, surrounded by mountains and gorgeous greenery, and its folksy homes and Main Street seem frozen as an Eisenhower-era Mayberry photo. This book rubs the gilded edges and soft focus off of all that, revealing the politics and manipulation that go into an MLB player getting his name and record immortalized on a gold plaque. The owners, the players, the media, and even the civic leaders of the town itself are exposed for their contributions to this grand manipulation.

Chafets has a candid, easy-to-read journalistic style. Bringing this along on our trip to Cooperstown Dreams Park this summer, I found the book a pleasant read that went down smoothly. Some of the material I was familiar with already from having seen the Ken Burns documentary Baseball (1994), but Cooperstown Confidential is enjoyable for anyone who digs the sport and isn't afraid to see his or her baseball "heroes" with some egg on their face, warts and all.

David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon

In 1925, British Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, along with his son and his son's best friend, led an expedition into the Amazon jungle in search of what Fawcett called the "City of Z," an ancient lost city once thought to be in the depths of Brazil. Despite being hailed as one of the leading explorers of the Amazon jungle, Fawcett and his party were never heard from again. In this book, which was expanded from a 2005 article in The New Yorker, journalist David Grann recounts his attempts to trace the Fawcett party's expedition into the wilderness in the hopes of learning (a) whatever happened to them, and (b) did they ever find the city they sought.

This is an outstanding piece of non-fiction that will keep you riveted throughout the reading. Not only does Grann keep the narrative of the expedition itself well-paced, but he gives the reader of solid sense of what Fawcett was like, flaws and all. His accounts of some of Fawcett's earlier expeditions are as amusing as they are gripping, especially when less-than-capable explorers were faced with the harsh conditions of the jungle and the demands that Fawcett put on anyone willing to join his party. Additionally, Grann's descriptions of the Amazon jungle -- its geography, its animals and insects, its various tribes (both friendly and deadly ones) -- make for a fascinating glimpse into a tropical world that is indeed a false Paradise.

Strongly recommended if you are looking for some good non-fiction!

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

For years, I've taught Beckett's Waiting for Godot in my A.P. English class and I've used it in my "Literature of Hell" class at the Newberry Library. I find Beckett stark yet hysterical. Before the school year ended in May, my friend and I went to see a performance of Endgame at the Steppenwolf. So in prepapration for the performance I read the play.

In typical Beckett fashion, it's impossible to summarize a "plot" here. Instead, in Endgame you are faced with four characters who embody the fears, enslavement, bombast, and futility of all that is Twentieth-Century Mankind. Hamm is a blind, regal character who sits atop his "throne" on a stack of skids; he cannot move or see. Clov is his manservant/slave who engages Hamm in most of the play's dialogue; he cannot stop moving, and much of his "action" involves looking at/for things. Nell and Nagg are the elderly parents of Hamm, both passive and relinguished to ashcans that take stage prominance. Nothing really "happens" in the play, and the dialogue presents us with conversations, monologues, bickerings, a story-within-a-story, and various other moments that collectively take up 90 minutes or so of stage time.

But isn't that much like what modern existence is like? Beckett creates four characters, each of whom are metaphors for the problems and frustrations and fears that come with modernity. And there is a post-apocalyptic starkness to what they see outside those windows, lending a sheltered futility to all conversations in which they engage. And, like Godot, Endgame concludes in a moment of crisis, a moment of choice, a moment of pause ...

How will it be resolved? WILL resolution come? Beckett asks us ... but doesn't answer.

Endgame is hardly a beach read and Beckett is certainly not everyone's cup of tea. But if you enjoy dark comedy, check out this play.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

I remember first reading this way back in college (when I was twenty-one). I remember finding the whole experience of this story extremely unsettling -- and for good reason: its distinctively nightmarish quality. Upon re-reading it today I was pleasantly surprised, and no less unsettled, by its timelessness.

We all know the story. Gregor Samsa awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic cockroach. The family (consisting of mother, father, and younger sister) is thrown into turmoil because Gregor, the primary breadwinner, cannot go to work. Everyone in the family struggles with how to cope with this revolting "thing" that was once a functioning member of the family. Shock, grief, resentment -- all the stages of coping with the transformation lead to the story's inevitable conclusion, yet the family endures.

Now in my forties, I find this tale even more unsettling in its depiction of a family coping with the disability of one of its family members. From the start, Gregor's physical condition deteriorates in various ways. Of course, the obvious theme of a person coping with the demands of a job, family, and financial distress infuses the story with its distinct modernity. And in many ways, is this story not really a metaphor ... for alcoholism?

The Metamorphosis is definitely a great story to read when you're an adolescent (I plan to add it to my A.P. curriculum this fall). But it's even more harrowing when you read it twenty-five years later!

Robert Crumb and David Zane Mairowitz, Kafka

In addition to reading The Metamorphosis, I also snagged a copy of Mairowitz's comic "biography" of Franz Kafka, brilliantly illustrated by none other than Robert Crumb! I say "biography" because, in addition to providing a wonderfully insightful account of the author life and Jewish background, it also contains sizeable excerpts from Kafa's major and minor works, passages from his diaries, interpretations of his works in light of their historical significance, and even comments on Kafka and the "Kafkaesque" within pop culture. So, in truth, it's much more than a biography.

Yet the great attraction here (for me, at least) is the artwork of Crumb, himself the perfect artist to illustrate the absurdity, the angst, the alienation, the carnality, the subversion, and the twisted grotesque Vision of Kafka's tales! In typical counter-culture hallucinatory Crumb style, the manic pen moves in insane crosshatch shading as Crumb captures the grime of Kafka's Prague ghetto, or the climactic moments of In The Penal Colony, or finally the tubercular dissolution of the author himself. Even now in his mid-sixties, Crumb's artwork continues to dazzle!

This is a great educational resource for anyone interested in the life and fiction of Franz Kafka, or for anyone who just digs terrific graphics. Check it out.

Happy Birthday, Gravity's Rainbow!

On this day in 1973, Thomas Pynchon's third novel, Gravity's Rainbow, entered American bookstores and split the literary world [...]

Click here for the whole entry.

James Kennedy, The Order of Odd Fish

Start with a healthy dose of grotesque Victorianism -- Charles Dickens or Lewis Carroll will do. Add splashes of Harry Potter and Franz Kafka with a cup of Monty Python and Edward Gorey. Season with pinches of William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, and the Book of Jonah ... and whatcha get is a deliciously absurd debut novel by Chicago author James Kennedy called The Order of Odd Fish.

Jo Larouche is a mild-mannered thirteen-year-old girl who, after visiting her Aunt Lily's Christmas costume party, finds herself journeying to the faraway land of Eldritch City, where she discovers a secret about her parents *and* herself that could topple the entire town. Befriending a bevy of cockroach butlers, engaging in a series of adventures involving insult guns, moving tapestries, and battling the evil Fiona Fuorlini atop armed ostriches in a climactic duel, Jo must come to terms with who she is in this highly original coming-of-age story for female readers.

What I found most enjoyable about the novel, however, was the author's sense of comic timing. In my opinion, he ranks among such writers as John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), Oscar Wilde, and Charles Dickens at his comic best -- The Pickwick Papers -- for creating dialogue and situations that bristle with humor and charm! And even when the elements of plot push the boundaries of plausibility, you find yourself enjoying the pure absurdity of the moment thanks to a writing style that remains engaging and original.

This is pure, unadulterated FUN! Enjoy!

Robin Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life of an American Original

For Christmas, Santa Claus gave me an Amazon Kindle. And the first book I downloaded and read via Kindle was this excellent biography of one of jazz's great pianists, Thelonious Monk.

First, let me discuss the book itself.

Kelley's pacing is impeccable as he recounts the early years of Monk's parents, the years growing up and starting out in the Harlem club scene, as well as the "un"-years, the bebop explosion, and the final years in seclusion. While sufficient time is spent analyzing the songs for which Monk became well-known, Kelley never allows the writing to become jargony or overwrought with obscure musical terminology. And his reverence for Monk is seen in his treatment of Monk's behavior over the years, erroneously attributed to mere eccentricity and irresponsibility; this may not be the first book to explore Monk's depression and how it affected his performance, creativity, and public perception, but it becomes quickly evident that the author loves and deeply respects his subject matter, making this all the more enjoyable to read.

If you like this era of jazz and you're looking for a biography that is a "good read," I highly recommend this book.

As for the Kindle itself, I love it! Never thought I'd say that, since I've always been a bibliophile who enjoys the aesthetics of a good book -- the smell of a used copy, the physicality of the pages, the book jacket or cover art, etc. But the Kindle is light and compact (much lighter than lugging around Thomas Pynchon's Against The Day, I tells ya!), and easily allows you to adjust the font size for a comfortable read. Combine that with the built-in New Oxford American Dictionary, highlighting and annotating features, and online access ... and you have a fun little device that actually enhances the reading experience! Now, it's not perfect, and I do have further observations about the reading experience that I'll explore here at another time, but I gotta admit: I am thoroughly enjoying my Kindle.

Now the big question: Which book do I download next?? Any suggestions??

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century

For the past month or so, I've been working through a few different sources that will enhance my upcoming Dickens seminar in Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit, and this is one of the books I found especially helpful.

Linebaugh's The London Hanged is an excellent examination of capital punishment in 18th Century England and how it related to an emerging awareness of personal property. The author draws from a wide variety of source material and spins a good yarn as chapter after chapter takes the reader through criminals and their crimes, class warfare, the slave trade, social uprisings -- all motivated by (and influencing) Britain's changing perceptions of socio-economic status within the 18th century. My primary focus while reading this book: the Gordon Riots of 1780, one of the worst social uprisings in English history and the subject of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.

Very readable, very engaging!

Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare

Any biography of William Shakespeare is automatically hobbled by one inconvenient fact: there isn't very much known about the guy. Once you get past the dates of "birth" and death, his formative years in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the approximate order in which he wrote and performed most of his plays, the rest is pure conjecture. So the mark of a truly good biography of Will becomes a question of how the biographer fills in the gaps.

Burgess, himself the author of A Clockwork Orange as well as dozens of additional novels and scholarly works, does an excellent job of filling in the gaps in this well-researched and highly readable biography of the Bard. He handles nicely the placement of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson within the Jacobean milieu in relation to Shakespeare, and he examines convincingly the ways in which historical events -- both social and political -- likely influenced Shakespeare's subject matter as he wrote his sonnets and plays. But what I most appreciated in this was Burgess's control of his style: while some novelists who don the cloak of biographer often let themselves get carried away by their own Muse (I'm talkin' to you, Peter Ackroyd), Burgess seasons his writing with just enough anecdotes, speculation, and wit without overshadowing his subject.

If you read one biography of William shakespeare, this is it. If you are beginning the study of Shakespeare's life and works, start here. This is an excellent read.

Les Standiford, The Man Who Invented Christmas

This was an enjoyable little book that sat on my shelf for almost a year before I finally got around to reading it. Subtitled "How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits," the book describes precisely that. And although it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know (having read and taught Carol and having previously read Stephen Nissenbaum's excellent The Battle for Christmas a few years ago), The Man Who Invented Christmas is a light, breezy read that will satisfy your yearnings for Yule.

Happy Holidays!

Here's a wonderful poem to commemorate today, the first day we had snow.

Enjoy!

Theodore Taylor, The Cay

One of the delights of having a twelve-year-old son (other than having someone else who can now collect the household trash and put away the laundry) is that it exposes me to some literary gems that have heretofore escaped my own reading. The Cay is one such book.

Set in the Caribbean during WWII, The Cay tells the story of Phillip Enright, a twelve-year-old boy who is torn from his mother and suddenly blinded when their boat is torpedoed off the coast of Curacao. He finds himself aboard a raft with Timothy, an old Jamaican man who serves as a father figure and Phillip's protector. When the two happen across a small island in the Caymans, it is Phillip who learns important life lessons about racism, sacrifice, and personal responsibility as they battle starvation and a hurricane, awaiting rescue all the while.

Beautifully written in a simple style, with action a-plenty told at a brisk pacing, The Cay is obviously an excellent novel for middle-schoolers. And there's just enough symbolism and social commentary to make this a wonderful introduction to the realm of literary analysis for youngsters.

My son just finished reading this novel in his Language Arts class and, with me reading it concurrently, it has given the two of us some opportunities for wonderful literary discussion! = )

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

This novel is pure, unadulterated fun! Guilty pleasure fun!

Set along the beachfronts of Los Angeles in 1969-70, our author gives us yet another Pynchonesque schlemiel, Larry "Doc" Sportello, a sandel-wearing private investigator cut from the familiar cloth of Tyrone Slothrop (Gravity's Rainbow), Oedipa Maas (The Crying of Lot 49), and Zoyd Wheeler (Vineland). Doc is confronted by old flame Shasta Fey Hepworth, who hires him to find her new lover, Mickey Wolfmann, who has recently disappeared. The ensuing investigation, which is a fun send-up of the traditional noir plot, sends Doc on a complex investigation that involves everything from Vegas lounges to port schooners to an underground organization (or is it?) called the Golden Fang. With its femme fatale, network of seedy minor characters, and seemingly endless smoking (tho what Doc smokes is a bit more ... um ... pungent), Pynchon channels Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler brilliantly in this homage to all things noir!

And for Pynchon fans, all the usual images and motifs and themes are there: the wacky song lyrics; the silly names; the really, really bad puns and doper humor; green and magenta; lightbulbs; mayonnaise; photography and film; paranoia -- it's all there! This is a veritable treasure trove for fans of The Man's works. A-and what struck me most was how long it's taken an author, whose fiction typically centers around the investigation of a mystery wherein the investigation becomes more and more complex, to finally come around to writing a work of noir fiction!

Maybe that's what makes the book "work" so well ... Pynchon (and his characters) were made for noir fiction!

Groovy!

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Desperately seeking a literary work to get me out of my recent reading rut, I turned to a novel suggested by one of the listers on the College Board listserv for A.P. English instructors ... and the novel turned out to be one of the best things I've read all year.

Set in Istanbul in the early 1990s, Snow tells the story of an exiled Turkish poet, Ka, who returns to his homeland posing as a journalist who is reporting on a recent series of suicides by young girls (these "Suicide Girls" have been struggling with the social and religious implications of covering their hair with the traditional headscarves). Ka is suffering from a profound writer's block -- and a blizzard is just beginning that will eventually seal off the residents of Kars for the next few days -- but Ka's return creates a sensation as he encounters members of a local theater troupe, fundamentalist radicals, Turkish law enforcement, and Ipek -- a beautiful woman who exposes Ka to love *and* the ability to once again compose poetry.

A simple summary, of course, doesn't give you much of a feel for the power of the prose, achieved through compelling conversations between characters that explore the various interpretations of words and actions that make up the belief system of Islam. For me, some of the most fascinating passages involved characters as they discussed the actions within a publicly televised play, and what social and religious implications those actions held for viewers. Pamuk's portrayal of both liberal and conservative Islamic mindsets remains compassionate throughout the narrative, offering the reader a rare glimpse of the impetus behind the tensions that continue to exist between Middle Eastern and Western lifestyles.

There is also a subtle complexity to the storytelling that I found enjoyable. Part of that subtlty comes from Pamuk himself, who is ultimately a character within the story (and who, it is revealed, is telling us this story four years hence). Additionally, I found delightful Pamuk's descriptions of the nineteen poems Ka comes to compose while in Kars; as readers, we are given vague sketches of each poem -- its composition, its style, its themes and images -- yet never given the actual poems ... which somehow heightens the overall effect and power of each poem.

A thoroughly enjoyable book that I highly recommend! Check it out.

The Rudderless Ship of Reading: Summer/Fall, 2009

It's been an odd few months of reading, and very unlike me to be this haphazard in my literary choices over a period of months. So although I've written nothing here since early June about what I've read, I have actually read quite a bit -- it's just been "all over the place."

Over most of the summer months, my reading consisted of four books: rereading Paradise Lost, Nicholas Nickleby, and The Old Curiosity Shop for my two Newberry classes, and tackling David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. While my interest was piqued early on in the reading of Wallace's "masterpiece" -- and certain passages were by turns hysterical, brilliant, or incomprehensible -- I was having a tough time keeping any sort of Big Picture in mind during the reading. Since Wallace is often compared to Pynchon and Delillo, I found myself noticing various parallels in style, motif, theme, etc. But, to be frank, a thousand pages is still a thousand pages, and although a friend of mine and I met up one evening for pizza to discuss our readings of the book (she was reading it too, and totally digging it!), it became more and more difficult for me to continue. Finally in early August, just as I was around page 600 in Infinite Jest ...

... Thomas Pynchon's new novel Inherent Vice came out! YES! So I took a week or so to slowly, savoringly enjoy the wackiness of this beautifully written work (which I have yet to write about here, but I will soon). Afterward, I found it impossible to return to the Wallace tome. And it was the start of the school year anyways by that time, so ... Infinite Jest remains, sadly, unfinished.

Overlapping much of this time period, however, was the prep time I needed for a fall seminar I was scheduled to co-teach with a Newberry colleague of mine. We were planning to collaborate on a seminar whose focus was Thomas Pynchon's thousand-page Against The Day, and so a portion of my summer months was additionally occupied with rereading that novel and doing some preliminary research. Unfortunately, low enrollment and some unforeseen school obligations led me to bow out of teaching the seminar, leaving Against the Day only partially reread and researched.

By late August school had begun and I was in the mode of rereading the usual books I have to teach during the early months of school -- The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth, Letters From Wolfie. During this time I "tried on" several books, just to jump-start a reading pattern that would kinda get me back to normal: I reread some passages from Lord of the Rings, a few chapters from some random Dostoyevsky, toyed with reading a Philip K. Dick novel, and even read a beautiful book by Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (which I have yet to also write about here, but I will soon). Nothing was grabbing me ...

... Until I started reading Orhan Pamuk's Snow. This was one of the most captivating books I've read all year, and I simply stumbled across the title via the College Board's listserv for A.P. English teachers. I'll finish the book in the next few days, and I look forward to writing about it here (as well as catching up on my other book reflections).

So, while I haven't read much ... I have read a lot ... much of it a strange collection of rereadings, incomplete readings, and two or three gems. I'll catch you up on the gems shortly. = )

Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 29, 2009

I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times. When I was much younger, I spent nearly a year in the old Reading Room of the British Museum, discovering in the book I was currently reading the title of the next I would read.

But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that no matter how long and how widely I read, I will only ever make my way through a tiny portion of the world’s literature. (The British Museum was a great place to learn that lesson.) And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater.

The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection. Childhood is an oasis of repetitive acts, so much so that there is something shocking about the first time a young reader reads a book only once and moves on to the next. There’s a hunger in that act but also a kind of forsaking, a glimpse of adulthood to come.

The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading. When I was in graduate school, once through Pope’s “Dunciad” or Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” was not going to cut it. A grasp of the poem was presumed to lie on the far side of many re-readings, none of which were really repetitions. The same is true of being a writer, which requires obsessive re-reading. But the real re-reading I mean is the savory re-reading, the books I have to be careful not to re-read too often so I can read them again with pleasure.

It’s a miscellaneous library, always shifting. It has included a book of the north woods: John J. Rowlands’s “Cache Lake Country,” which I have re-read annually for many years. It may still include Raymond Chandler, though I won’t know for sure till the next time I re-read him. It includes Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and lots of A.J. Liebling and a surprising amount of George Eliot. It once included nearly all of Dickens, but that has been boiled down to “The Pickwick Papers” and “Great Expectations.” There are many more titles, of course. This is not a canon. This is a refuge.

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/opinion/30sat4.html