On Rereading & Becoming

I keep a list of the books I reread. Not the ones I read for the first time — those have their own shelf, their own system. The rereads get a separate notebook, a small green one I bought at a stationery shop in a city I no longer live in. Each entry includes the title, the date, and a single line about why I went back.

The reasons are never what I expect. I don't reread books because I've forgotten them. I reread them because I've changed, and I want to see if the book has changed too. It always has. Or rather, I always have, and the book is kind enough to show me how.

We don't return to the same book. We return to the same words with different eyes, and the distance between those two readings is the distance we've travelled.

The first book I remember rereading on purpose was The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I was nineteen the first time and twenty-four the second. At nineteen, I read it as a thriller — the beauty, the murder, the unravelling. At twenty-four, I read it as a story about the particular cruelty of people who believe they are exceptional. Same sentences. Entirely different book.

This is what rereading does. It doesn't give you new information; it gives you new context. The words on the page haven't moved, but you have. You've had five more years of conversations, heartbreaks, commutes, meals eaten standing up, mornings where the light came in at an angle you'd never noticed before. All of that gets folded into the reading. The book becomes a collaboration between the person who wrote it and the person you are now.

I think about this in terms of sentences. There's a line in Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin: "Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition." I first read that at twenty-one, sitting on the floor of a sublet apartment that didn't feel like mine. I underlined it because it sounded important. I didn't understand it. I just knew it meant something I wasn't ready to hold.

I reread the novel at twenty-eight, in a different city, in a different life. By then I'd moved four times. I'd left a relationship I thought was permanent. I'd started writing seriously, which meant I'd started paying attention to language the way you pay attention to weather — not because it's decorative, but because it determines what kind of day you're going to have.

When I reached that line again, I had to stop reading. Not because it surprised me, but because it didn't. It arrived like something I'd been thinking for years without finding the words. Baldwin had written it decades before I was born, and it had been waiting for me to catch up.

The best books are patient. They say what they mean the first time, and then they wait for you to hear it.

This patience is what separates the books I reread from the books I merely liked. A book I liked entertains me. A book I reread teaches me something new each time — not because it's dense or difficult, but because it's honest enough to hold more than one meaning. It doesn't explain itself. It trusts me to bring what I need.

My green notebook has forty-three entries now. Some books appear more than once. Persuasion by Jane Austen is in there three times: once at twenty-three ("the letter"), once at twenty-seven ("the waiting"), and once at thirty ("the second chance, and what it costs"). Each entry is a self-portrait disguised as a book review.

I think this is why I find the question "What's your favourite book?" so difficult to answer. It's not that I can't choose. It's that the answer depends on when you're asking. The book I need at twenty-two — the one that cracks me open and shows me how much I don't know — is not the book I need at thirty-one, which is usually something quieter, something that says: I know. Sit down. It's okay.

My favourites are the books that can do both. The ones that are thrilling at twenty and devastating at thirty. The ones whose sentences keep working long after you've closed the cover, not because they're clever but because they're true in a way that takes time to recognise.

Rereading is how I measure who I'm becoming. Not by the books I add to my shelves, but by the ones I return to. Each reread is a conversation with a past version of myself — the one who underlined that sentence, who folded that page, who wrote yes in the margin at midnight. I don't always agree with her. But I'm always grateful she left me a trail.

There's a Mary Oliver line I think about often: "Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." I don't know if she was talking about books. But every time I reread something that moved me — something that left a mark I didn't understand at the time — I think she might as well have been.

The books we return to are the boxes of darkness we keep opening. Each time, we understand a little more. Each time, the gift becomes clearer. And each time, the distance between who we were and who we are reveals itself not as loss, but as the slow, imperfect, beautiful work of becoming.

I'll keep the green notebook. I'll keep going back. I have a feeling the list will tell me more about my life than any diary ever could.