On the Pleasures of Re-Reading vs. Blogging

12 August 2009 | Culture, Internet, Media, Online Writing, Personal | Comments

On a recent road-trip with my eight-year-old daughter, H, we visited with a favorite former student of mine, Y, who is now a high-test corporate attorney. We met at the Emeryville Barnes & Noble and as we wandered, picking up fresh books for H, Y mentioned that she never re-reads novels, always preferring something new.

My eyebrows lifted at this, as to me re-reading is a special pleasure and it had never occured to me that this was unusual or a family trait– H is also a big re-reader, as is Kathi, my wife).

I read a LOT and I re-read a lot: when I travel on busienss I often find myself visiting with old textual friends (“It’s homey,” as H says) like Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice,” the Vorkosigan adventures by Lois McMaster Bujold or — and this one I finished for perhaps the 40th time over my morning cup of coffee a few minutes ago — Heinlein’s majestic “Time Enough For Love.” Last week, I downloaded “Huckleberry Finn” onto the new Kindle Dx (a seven-league-boots leap forward for Amazon, by the way) for my next trip.

Speaking of Mark Twain, one of the best passages on re-reading I’ve encountered comes from the first chapter of Annie Dillard’s autobiography, “An American Childhood” where she talks about her father’s disasterous boating trip down the Mississippi River and what provoked it:

In 1955, when I was ten, my father’s reading went to his head.
My father’s reading during that time, and for many years before and after, consisted for the most part of Life on the Mississippi. He was a young executive in the old family firm, American Standard; sometimes he traveled alone on business. Traveling, he checked into a hotel, found a bookstore, and chose for the night’s reading, after what I fancy to have been long deliberation, yet another copy of Life on the Mississippe. He brought all these books home. There were dozens of copies of Life on the Mississippi on the living-room shelves. From time to time, I read one.

Re-reading lets me focus on the HOW of a piece of writing, not just the WHAT of its sense. If I’m just reading for plot (like, say, the J. D. Robb “In Death” mysteries that are a guilty pleasure like a pint container of Chunky Monkey in my lap while I sit on the couch watching The Mentalist) then there’s not a lot of point to re-reading, but the best books, even the best mysteries (Ellis Peters’ Cadfael books, for example) exceed the pleasures of plot and merit thinking about the how.  This is true of novels, essays, and particularly denser language like verse. The Russian Formalist critic Yuri Lotman famously once said that we don’t read poetry, we only re-read poetry.

There’s also a kinaesthetic old-jeans comfort about the physicality of a favorite book: my fingers know just where to hold the pages and the measuring pressure between the ball of my right thumb and the side of my right index finger hints at how far I’ve come in a reading session and how far I have to go.  The progress bar on the Kindle Dx doesn’t compare.

That cozy knowledge can also inhibit critical awareness, so it’s sometimes handy to read a new edition of an old friend — I did this regularly when I was a Shakespearean, flipping from edition to edition — or mildly tragic when a beloved copy of a book gets lost and the replacement just isn’t the same. I’m curious how reading Huck Finn on the Kindle will be different than reading the ancient, friendly, black-covered hardback edition I found in my grandmother’s front-hall cupboard when I was nine, or the green scholarly edition I read in grad school.

Which brings me to blogging and reading blogs.

The physical properties of books helps great writing stake out space in my head that vaguely corresponds to the space on my book shelves.  I can stumble across a book while looking for something else, pick it up, and in moments step into another place.  It’s particularly true of fiction but also works with the best nonfiction.

With digital media — whether a PDF or on a website or on the Kindle — the kinaesthetics drop out.  I rarely go back to re-read a great blog post because they’re hard to find without SEARCHING for them, and searching is different than stumbling.  And for all its merits the Kindle doesn’t let me organize my many digital books in any personalized way– just by author, title or date acquired.

To be fair, there’s not a lot of re-writing in blogs; by design blogs are the unedited firstlings of the writer’s heart (to paraphrase Macbeth), and for an information-acquisition mode nothing beats them.

But its hard to SAVOR a post, and this is why no matter how much I love the Kindle and digital media in general, I don’t think that books, physical books, will vanish any time soon.  We need at least some of our things to exceed the spatial constraints of a screen.

When I worked at EarthLink, for example, the explicit purpose of our magazine bLink was so that our customers’ experience of the company would extend beyond the PC and beyond sitting at the kitchen table with a checkbook once a month paying the bill.  In other words, we wanted our customers to think about EarthLink while sitting on the toilet because we thought that extra-computer engagement would bind them more closely to the brand.

These days, I travel with the Kindle, a magazine or two (for takeoff and landing) and at least one non-digital book.  Not everything can be constrained by a screen.