Old Books

The A to Z Blogging Challenge is keeping me engaged with writing and reading. Not that I have a problem finding time to read or doing it.

I read when I go to bed. I read when I get up. I read when I eat, when I watch television, while I wait. But, you'll be glad to know I gave up reading while I drive. Thank goodness for audio books.

While visiting other blogs in the A to Z Challenge I ran across one who talked about rereading books and how the book was different the new time we read it. They asked which books we reread and how we read them differently each time. (I never think to ask my blog readers what they think, but I always appreciate them taking their time to comment. And I love reading the comments on other bloggers' posts.)

I reread Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It keeps me writing. It keeps me sane.

I know what's going to happen next, so I can put it down and get back to writing, or do the laundry, or keep a commitment. When the daily stress gets to be too much, I can jump back into whichever book I'm on and escape to a place where the stress is so much greater than mine that mine is forgotten. Who'da thought books about impending doom with characters racing from battle to battle, facing terrifying mutants would be my security blanket?

It's hard to justify rereading books when there are so many out there that I haven't read yet. So many old ones. So many new ones. So many yet to come. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to have experienced all the books you want to read without having to take the time?

Ah, but I started out thinking about old books. An 'old' book is any book written by Dickens or by any other author that I've read. New books are those I've not read yet regardless of when they were written.

That inspired me to reread Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I started it, but I can't finish it. I've learned too much about writing and can't turn off my inner editor to enjoy it. It tells the story too much from the outside. Why that should stop me, I don't know. But I've the same problem with Julian Fellowes' new book Belgravia.

It's not that I need a story in first person, to feel a part of it. To be there. But I do need the story told from the characters' points of view, not the author's.

Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath was required reading when I was in high school. What a terrible choice to require of teens to read. His Of Mice and Men would have been a much better choice.  It's a deliciously tragic story of friendship. They did have us read Romeo and Juliet. Teens love tragedies. Life, at that age, is so intense and in the moment.

The tragedy in Grapes of Wrath takes too long for people too young to know just how long life can be especially when it's tragic. And it often is.

Grapes of Wrath is the story of a lifetime of human endurance. By the time I'd slogged through it as a teen, the ending was just another in a long line of dreariness. I completely missed the characters' strength to carry on even though there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I'm so glad I reread it thirty years later.

And Dickens? Reread Dickens? Certainly not. I get tired of him about three-quarters of the way through and swear never to read him again. But I always finish the book and find myself later looking to read him again -- maybe nine months, maybe two years, but I always come back. It's his characters. The situations they find themselves in. I know them personally. Not just from inside Dickens' books but from down the street, from my childhood, from my family.

There is something in Dickens about writing to be learned by rereading. How does he make them seem real? Involve us in the story?

I can feel an old Dickens book coming on.