Rereadings

Edited by Anne Fadiman. I scanned through a lot of this one. These were originally published in The American Scholar. Each essay is written by a famous author and recounts a rereading of a book that was highly influential earlier in life. To show how much I know, none of the "famous writers" were familiar to me; neither were most of their influential books.

I did really love reading about a woman's connection to her wildflower identification book. She traipes about the hills, looking at flowers, as a 19 year old, with her Peterson's in hand and later goes on to become a biologist. I love this line: "Why I persisted in carrying it around and consulting its crowded pages at every opportunity, I have no idea. The book was stubborn; well, I was stubborn too; that was part of it. And I had no choice, really, not if I wanted to get in. A landscape may be handsome in the aggregate, but this book led to the particulars, and that's what I wanted." I have recently felt again the desire to become more connected to my locality. And, coincidentally, one thing I've been wanting to get is a Trees of Minnesota book.

This essay, in the middle of the book, was the first one I read and persuaded me to look at some of the other chapters.

I liked this too:

I read the book slowly, in part because it was dense and in part because I wanted to be seen reading it. I wore the book as much as I read it, "absentmindedly" holding it in one hand on the street even when I was carrying a satchel of books in the other, "casually" parking it atop my notebook next to my coffee cup wherever I sat.

I love sneeking peeks at what other people are reading. A couple of years ago, AJ and I went on a cruise and I smugly compared my vacation reading material with all the Danielle Steeles and John Grishoms that were out there.

So even though the authors and the material they discussed were unknown, the subtext of the way particular books shape us was cozy and familiar.