Eleven years ago I decided to reread one particular novel every January. I had read it twice already, six years apart, and the second reading had been so unlike the first that I wanted to know whether that was the book or me.
I will not tell you which novel it is. People ask, and the answer always disappoints them, because it is not a great book. It is a good one, of middling length, set in a town I have never been to, and I liked it the first time for reasons I no longer share.
What I expected
More in it each time. Hidden structure, foreshadowing, jokes I had missed, the slow reveal of a design the author had built for the patient reader.
A little of that is true. There is a paragraph in the fourth chapter that quietly answers a question asked in the eleventh, and I did not see the connection until the third January. There is a running joke about a clock that I missed entirely for two readings.
It stopped happening around year five. There is a finite amount of hidden structure in a novel, even a good one, and after five careful passes I had most of it. If rereading were only about finding more in the book, I would have stopped then.
What actually changed
The book stayed still and I moved, and because the book stayed still I could measure the movement.
The main character’s brother, whom I found insufferable at twenty-eight, I found sympathetic at thirty-four, and slightly insufferable again at thirty-nine. That tells me nothing about him. It tells me a good deal about the three years before thirty-nine.
The chapter I used to skim, a long description of a harbour in winter, is now the one I read most slowly. I did not change my mind about it in any single year. I noticed, around year eight, that I had started to slow down there, and when I checked my notes it had been happening for three years.
This is the argument for rereading that nobody makes. The usual case is that great books reward rereading because they are deep. That is true and it is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that any book you know well becomes an instrument, and the instrument measures you.
The notes
I keep a single page of notes per January, written on the evening I finish. Not an essay, not a review: whatever I noticed, in the order I noticed it. Eleven pages now, dated, in a folder by themselves.1
Read in sequence they are more interesting than the novel. They are also slightly embarrassing, which I take as a sign that they are honest.
The practical part
If you want to try this, a few things I learned the slow way.
Pick a book you like rather than one you admire. Admiration will not carry you past the fourth January. You need to want to open it on a cold evening, not to feel that you ought to.
Pick something you can finish in a week of evenings. A book that takes a month becomes a project, and projects get abandoned in February.
Keep the notes somewhere else, dated, and do not reread them until you have finished the book that year. Otherwise you read your old self instead of the novel.
Do not switch edition. I did, in year seven, when the old paperback finally lost its spine, and the new setting made it a slightly different book. The page breaks moved, the chapter openings moved, a line I knew as the last on a left-hand page now sat in the middle of a right-hand one. Where a chapter ends on the page changes where it ends in the head.2
Why January
Because it is the worst month, and the ritual is easiest to keep when there is nothing better to do. And because a year is the right interval: long enough to have changed, short enough to remember the last reading.
The point was never any single pass. It is the series.
