The year is almost over, the wick burned down to the candle’s very dregs. The solstice is days away. Christmas, for those who celebrate, just a bit further in the distance. Everything feels very near and full of endings. Friends who love holiday media are in high gear, and even I—skeptical about everything but holiday cocktails and Christmas lights—can get a little flood of sentimentality. Maybe I need to watch the truly best of holiday movies (The Apartment). Maybe I should indulge in the best-worst, too (look, I’m sorry, I just have a soft spot for half the cast of Love Actually).
The winter holidays are often times of repetition, which is another way to say tradition: Doing the same things you do each year, always with something a little different, whether a new family member or a new side dish or a new addition to the rewatching lineup. Maybe. Though I struggle to fully commit to the task, I still absolutely believe that the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is when you rewatch the Lord of the Rings films. All of them. Preferably extended editions. At the very least it’s time to have big feelings about the lighting of the beacons.
But if winter is the best season for festive, traditional rewatching, it’s also the best time for rereading.
And as I look over my unread books shelf case, my eyes keep straying. I decided a month or two ago that I was only going to read books I already had for the rest of the year—no making new friends, only keeping (and finally turning the pages on) the old. But it’s the really old friends that keep calling to me. Am I not entirely satisfied with Ruth Ozeki’s newest novel because of the book itself, or because I want to be rereading A Tale for the Time Being? (I am only a third of the way into the new one; my opinion is very likely to change.) If I reread all Gregory Maguire’s Oz books before the final book in his newest trilogy, how will that change my reading of it?
These questions start and then multiply like fruit flies. Which Jo Clayton series should I reread—which will hold up the best? What if I reread Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and finally read To Green Angel Tower, both massive tomes of it? (This might have been the first series I loved yet somehow never finished.) I tell people about Nalo Hopkinson’s brilliant Midnight Robber all the time but I haven’t read it in years—what will I find in that astonishing book now that I didn’t see on first reading?
Rereading is comfort food, but it can also be kind of fraught, especially when you can’t seem to shake the thought of all those books you haven’t read yet. When you read and work with books for a living, there’s always something you should be reading, for a whole variety of definitions of should: I should just know about that book. I should understand why people love this author. I should see what this trend is all about. I should give my friend feedback on her work. I should give that author another try.
Rereading is throwing should to the wind—which is something I fully recommend doing every so often, or very often, or as often as you’re comfortable with. (Being uncomfortable is useful sometimes too.) It’s almost a whole different way of reading, setting aside the mystery of a new story to find the hidden secrets of an old one. It feels different, emotionally, when you know what’s coming and you’re just enjoying the path taken to get there; it allows different things to matter, to rise to the surface of your mind or imagination—themes or motifs you didn’t see, characters you brushed past in the grip of a plot, only to find they mattered in some vital way, either to the plot or to you, now, rereading from a slightly different vantage point.
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Lost in the Moment and Found
There’s a Le Guin quote for this, because there’s a Le Guin quote for many of the key bookish thoughts a person can have. “If a book told you something when you were 15,” she wrote in a piece published in Harper’s, “it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”
I can tend to forget about those whole new books—the ones I’ve read before. But I have never reread a book and regretted doing so. Rereading Wicked showed me how much that book is about grief, which is something I knew in my heart but did not understand in my conscious mind until I fell whole-heartedly back into Elphie’s story two years ago, intending to write something about the book’s 25th anniversary (something I could never quite manage to put into words). The books I reread show up in these columns in passing mentions because once reread, they won’t get out of my mind: The perfect finding-yourself road trip of Tess of the Road, the absolutely compelling narrative of trauma and communication and freedom and change, deep-seated change, that runs through Bitterblue.
Winter is a time for tradition, for comfort, for feeling things deep in your bones. Rewatching the things that shaped us doesn’t hit the same in the summer—at least not to me. Rereading is no different. We’re holing up, huddling into blankets and lighting more candles against the dark, making soups and stews and finding ways to feel hearty despite barely seeing the sun. This is the time to return to Toad Hall, to remember everything magical about The Book of Three, to find all the things you missed in that first breathless read of The Fifth Season. It’s time for the second book in Catherynne Valente’s Fairyland series, the one where September goes to the underworld; it’s the season for every single book with a dramatic snow- or ice-bound setting or key scene, from The Left Hand of Darkness to American Gods and beyond.
What is it you want most, right now? Where does that feeling live in a book that you know, that you love, that you want to revisit and learn from again?
I want inspiration, idealism, truth; more than anything, I want hope, and maybe some defiance.
And as I think this, The Hero and the Crown catches my eye.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
