I'm sure you will all be thrilled to learn that one of my book clubs is still going strong. Using the word "club" to describe it may be a misnomer, actually—it's just me and my friend Ashley meeting up occasionally to talk about books. The whole thing nearly petered last year due to a bad book selection; we tried and failed to read Don Quixote and didn't meet for six months because we both stubbornly refused to concede defeat. When we saw each other for other reasons during that time we would just whine about how much we hated the book and gleefully confess to each other all the other things we'd read.
(And in case you're wondering, the other book club I was in died a quick death for me when someone who went only once (but was still on the email list) insisted that we shouldn't be reading so many books by white men. But that's...another story.)
Ashley and I just finished The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (we didn't love it), and before that we read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (we loved it). Our chats about the assigned reading are very enjoyable, of course, but I've found that decisions about what to read next are often the best part of being in this book "club," because we both read a lot and that means we just end up talking about books in general. Case in point: we spent a good half hour last time we met talking about Brideshead Revisited, which Ashley had just finished reading and which has long been a favorite of mine.
Talking about the book with her, I realized I needed to at least skim through it again: I had a definite memory of what it was about but I couldn't recall most of the details. So I came home, dug out my copy, and started rereading. A few days later I'd finished the whole book, and I realized two things: 1) it was way, way better than I remembered, and 2) I hadn't understood it at all the first time.
I actually have no memory of when I first read Brideshead, but I do know for sure that my mother recommended it to me and that I didn't read her copy, which means I must have bought it myself, and the earliest I would have done that was my first year in college (15 years ago, bah!). One thing I know for sure is that I must have read it before 2010, because by then I would have certainly realized that the central theme of the book is Catholicism, and I definitely missed that on the first reading. (I'm certain my mother, who spent 12 years in Catholic school, did not miss that in her reading.)
How I could possibly profess to have read and enjoyed this novel without understanding the religious themes is frankly ridiculous to me. Julia of ten years ago may not have been very smart, which I guess is not altogether surprising: she did, after all, start this blog.
The experience of rereading Brideshead was a little like having an encounter between me now and the me of 10 years ago, which is a strange and uncomfortable experience. I've done it before: rereading The Republic in grad school with all my college marginalia was definitely like having a frustrating conversation with a dumber version of myself. But the space of time was shorter in that scenario: just 4 years between readings as opposed to 10, and it felt much less disconcerting to learn that I'd misread The Republic, which I never really felt I understood, than that I'd misread a novel I loved and thought I got the gist of.
While it's encouraging to know that I've learned something in the past 10 years, it's disheartening to realize that I now need to go back and reread my favorite books from pre-2010 to make sure I understood what the heck I was reading. It's going to take a while.
(And in case you're wondering, the other book club I was in died a quick death for me when someone who went only once (but was still on the email list) insisted that we shouldn't be reading so many books by white men. But that's...another story.)
Ashley and I just finished The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (we didn't love it), and before that we read Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (we loved it). Our chats about the assigned reading are very enjoyable, of course, but I've found that decisions about what to read next are often the best part of being in this book "club," because we both read a lot and that means we just end up talking about books in general. Case in point: we spent a good half hour last time we met talking about Brideshead Revisited, which Ashley had just finished reading and which has long been a favorite of mine.
Talking about the book with her, I realized I needed to at least skim through it again: I had a definite memory of what it was about but I couldn't recall most of the details. So I came home, dug out my copy, and started rereading. A few days later I'd finished the whole book, and I realized two things: 1) it was way, way better than I remembered, and 2) I hadn't understood it at all the first time.
I actually have no memory of when I first read Brideshead, but I do know for sure that my mother recommended it to me and that I didn't read her copy, which means I must have bought it myself, and the earliest I would have done that was my first year in college (15 years ago, bah!). One thing I know for sure is that I must have read it before 2010, because by then I would have certainly realized that the central theme of the book is Catholicism, and I definitely missed that on the first reading. (I'm certain my mother, who spent 12 years in Catholic school, did not miss that in her reading.)
How I could possibly profess to have read and enjoyed this novel without understanding the religious themes is frankly ridiculous to me. Julia of ten years ago may not have been very smart, which I guess is not altogether surprising: she did, after all, start this blog.
The experience of rereading Brideshead was a little like having an encounter between me now and the me of 10 years ago, which is a strange and uncomfortable experience. I've done it before: rereading The Republic in grad school with all my college marginalia was definitely like having a frustrating conversation with a dumber version of myself. But the space of time was shorter in that scenario: just 4 years between readings as opposed to 10, and it felt much less disconcerting to learn that I'd misread The Republic, which I never really felt I understood, than that I'd misread a novel I loved and thought I got the gist of.
While it's encouraging to know that I've learned something in the past 10 years, it's disheartening to realize that I now need to go back and reread my favorite books from pre-2010 to make sure I understood what the heck I was reading. It's going to take a while.
2 comments:
I *hate* my old marginalia. And the worst is making copies to share with others and realizing there's embarrassing old marginalia that got copied too.
Oh gosh, I would probably pretend I lost the book before I shared my old marginalia with anyone!
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