I’ve been thinking about my reading habits. I’ve always had this thing about reading a book twice. I know people who will read a book over and over. My daughter is one of them. Every time a new Harry Potter book or movie was released, she would read the previous books again and in the right order. She said it was so everything was fresh in her mind. It makes perfect sense, except for the time it takes. I just couldn’t do it. My brain would seize as soon as the story became familiar. I couldn’t say, I know this already and it’s okay. I would be looking around for something else, mostly on my nightstand where there is a tall tower of books which often goes crash in the night.
That was until Tommy. He’s two and he’s my first grandchild, so a VIP in my mind. Best of all, he’s into books in a very big way. When he’s uncertain, he reaches for his favourite book. When I take him out for the day, the BOOK comes too. When he’s tired and grumpy, we have the BOOK. For over a year, it was Where the Wild Things Are. Every second Thursday when we’d hang out, I’d read this book many times a day and it wasn’t just me. No one was spared. We all ‘rolled our terrible eyes’ and ‘gnashed our terrible teeth’, so often it became positively theatrical. His mother, his father, his other grandparents and I became performance artists. We knew the story by heart. We still do.
Tommy is onto Slinky Malinky now. At two and-three-quarters, his tastes are evolving. I like ‘Slinky’ too. It rhymes in a pleasing way and I almost know this one by heart as well. He still has time for ‘Wild Tings’ though, and I’m glad about this. Life has been enriched by the many renditions, the playing with voices, the timing of the delivery, the rolling, the gnashing. It’s entered my DNA. I swear I’m part wild thing now and so is he.
I suppose it’s because a toddler is a fearsome being and children’s books are short, that Where the Wild Things Are is the first book I can remember reading repeatedly. But short stories are less time-consuming than novels as well and in the spirit of this I’ve embarked on a great re-reading of the ones I love best.
There’s:
- Ernest Hemingway’s, A Clean Well-Lighted Place
- James Joyce’s, The Dead
- Nadine Gordimer, A Company of Laughing Faces
- Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
- Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
- Edith Wharton, Roman Fever
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper
- Anton Chekov, The Lady with the Pet Dog
- Raymond Carver, Cathedral
- Laura Elvery, Skin to Skin
Phew! That’s ten. My new reading list. I consider if I read these over again, they too, will enter the DNA. I know with each of these stories there was emotional tug, an almost recognition of some shared humanity and these are the kinds of stories I like best. Indeed, they are the kinds of stories I try to write.
If re-reading is too time-consuming for you, give short stories a try. Make a list of the one’s you want to read, read them and then read them again, and see what residue they leave behind.