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When I wrote about The Scarlet Letter I mentioned that is was part of a project I began (and then ended) to reread a number of the books I read in high school and have not read since. Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane was the other book I read in the project. When I began reading it I was already wavering on the project and the book cemented my decision to not continue. I figure if I have not read a book since high school there was probably a good reason for that.
 
So, Red Badge of Courage. One of the few books I read in high school that I recall not liking at all. I hoped with time and maturity the reread would reveal the book to be amazing. Nope. While I can certainly appreciate it in a way I did not when I was 14, I still found it to be a very dull book.
 
First published in 1895, the book is a shining example of realism. Told from the limited third person perspective of Henry Fleming, a young man who joins up to fight in the American Civil War. His idea of what war is does not match the reality. Before he leaves, and even for a long time before he experiences battle he thinks,

It must be some sort of a play affair. He had long despaired of witnessing a Greek like struggle. Such would be no more, he had said. Men were better, or more timid.

When his regiment is finally sent out into the field they spend quite a lot of time walking and walking and walking, camping, walking some more as they are ordered to a new position, camping, waiting, waiting, waiting, only to have to move again. It is a tedious affair and the longer Henry has to wait for a battle the more he begins to worry that he will be a coward and turn and run. He becomes so obsessed by this worry that he starts asking his comrades probing questions in an attempt to find out what they think of the matter and succeeds only in annoying them.

When the battle finally comes, Henry does fine on the first assault but the enemy regroups and charges and breaks part of the line. Henry, seeing some of his comrades falling back in retreat, panics and turns tail and runs as fast and far away as he can.

He spends quite a long time wandering and berating himself for running while also trying to justify his actions. Eventually he falls in with wounded soldiers who are moving away from the lines because they can no longer fight. Among them is his friend Jim Conklin who was badly wounded, delirious, and eventually dies. During this time Henry is repeatedly asked where his wound is but avoids answering the question.

He does eventually get a wound but it doesn’t come from battle. He is whacked in the head with the butt of a riffle when he gets mixed up in a column of retreating soldiers. When he makes it back to his own regiment they all think he has been grazed in the head by a bullet and treat him kindly. Henry does not tell them the truth.

All this takes up a large portion of the book and I was beginning to think that perhaps this was an anti-war novel since the horrors are so brutally graphic and revelatory in just how much the lives of men like Henry are mere fodder.

But then the final part of the book is battle after battle and Henry, in an attempt to atone for his previous cowardice and desertion, fights valiantly and even becomes standard bearer when the previous one falls, leading his regiment to victory. During this time Henry acts almost entirely on fear, adrenaline and rage. He needs to prove himself and prove that he and his comrades are not useless and good for nothing like he overheard some officers saying they were.

And suddenly the book does not seem so anti-war any longer. It is blood and courage and glory. Henry survives the battle. His regiment regroups and gets new marching orders. As they march off, Henry thinks:

He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

And it rains. And they trudge through mud. And the book ends:

Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks–an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

What the heck are we supposed to make of that? Is Henry just as delusional now as he was before he went to join the army? Does he think the tranquility is going to be real? Or has he faced death and, knowing there are more battles ahead and he is likely to die, looking forward to a heavenly reward? I apparently am not the only one to wonder as the interwebs tell me scholars have been debating the ambiguous ending for a very long time. Well and so.

The thing I remember most from high school about this book was my teacher going on and on about Christ figures. I had misremembered it as being Henry and while reading I was so confused because I just could not see it. Turns out, the Christ figure is supposedly Henry’s friend Jim Conklin, the one he finds wounded and delirious. I am almost 100% certain that when I read that, I made the same face I did in high school when my teacher said as much.

The difference between then and now (ok there are a lot of differences, but don’t quibble with me on this) is that then there was only Cliff’s Notes and now there is the all-knowing Google. I don’t recall Cliff as being especially helpful in this case. Google, however, tells me this whole Christ figure thing is hotly disputed because no one seems to know what the book means and so a group of scholars decided it was an allegory even though the evidence for this is thin. I don’t remember if says Cliff anything about this or not, but since my entire class realized early on in the first semester that the teacher was cribbing almost everything from Cliff, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.

It also goes a long way in explaining why I was so garsh durned baffled about this idea and how it set me up for repeated “Christ figure” traumas throughout my freshman, and most of my high school, English classes. When mixed with the basic narrative conflicts drilled into my head (man against nature, man against society, man against man, man against self) it made for a pretty murky five-paragraph essay soup. How I survived high school English and majored in English literature at University is a mystery I will never be able to solve. My only guess is that I loved reading and books so much before I got to high school that there was nothing they could do ruin it for me. And thank heavens for that!

Centireading. Have you heard of it? Me neither but it’s officially a thing now because it’s on the internet. A gent in the UK named Stephen Marche invented the word and you can read all about it at the Guardian (via).

What is centireading you ask? Why reading a book one hundred times of course. Since my response was why on earth would anyone want to read a book 100 times, I am not a good candidate for centireading. Marche says that it

belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading.

Extreme sports I can understand, but extreme reading? Nope (unless it involves reading in strange, possibly dangerous, places then extreme reading makes sense to me). I’m not much of a rereader to begin with. I only ever reread one to three books a year and sometimes none. The most I have ever read a book is six times. The honor belongs to Pride and Prejudice. I can imagine reading it again one day, but I would be surprised if, at the end of my life, the total times I’d read it reached ten. Still, I suppose one never really knows. Perhaps one day I will be snowed in somewhere for days and have only one book to read and one thing will lead to another and before I know it I’ve read it 99 times and once you get that far you have to read it one more time just so you can say you read it 100 times.

Marche has only read two books 100 times, Hamlet and The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Yes, after reading a book so many time you are on the verge of having it memorized. And yes,

By the time you read something more than a hundred times, you’ve passed well beyond “knowing how it turns out”. The next sentence is known before the sentence you’re reading is finished. […] Centireading reveals a pleasure peculiar to text lurking underneath story and language and even understanding. Part of the attraction of centireading is that it provides the physical activity of reading without the mental acuity usually required.

So it seems eventually after a certain point, even Hamlet becomes a sort of comfort read. Still, you’d have to really like a book a lot to read it that many times. And what about all those other books you don’t read because your are reading that book again?

A faint tang of guilt can sometimes follow a bout of centireading. Life is brief and there is so much to read. But I cannot imagine that I will find another book to read a hundred times in my life. You can be acquaintances with many books, and friends with a few, but family with only one or two.

What is the most times you have ever read a book? How likely is it you will ever be a member of the centireading club?

I first read Jane Austen’s Emma in an undergrad literature class. I read it for a second time in a grad school Jane Austen seminar. I wasn’t thrilled with the book either time. It all seemed so bland. Even Frank Churchill’s deception was dull. Out of Austen’s six novels this one was solidly ranked as number five for me with Mansfield Park at the bottom. On this my third reading of the book something happened. Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting much. Maybe it’s because I have been rereading one Austen a year and this is year six making Emma last. Whatever the case may be, I very much enjoyed the book this time around. I enjoyed it so much I can’t decide if I should move it up just one notch to fourth or all the way to third. It doesn’t matter since no one cares but me, but it does help me give you an idea how much I suddenly liked the book.

I don’t have to like the protagonists of my books in order to like the book, but there has always been something about Emma herself that just rubbed me the wrong way and made me grind my teeth. Snobby, self-centered, privileged meddler about sums up how I saw her. That hasn’t changed but I found myself more sympathetic to her. A good amount of that sympathy is because of her hypochondriac of a father, Mr. Woodhouse. Oh my goodness, he sometimes made me want to break something in order to relieve my frustration over all his little worries. Emma is infinitely patient with him and should be considered for sainthood.

I believe I also unknowingly primed myself to like Emma by reading Being Wrong, a book about all the various ways we can be spectacularly wrong regarding anything and everything. And Emma turns out to spend so much time being wrong that it is almost funny especially since she prides herself on being so perceptive. Because she is a lady, however, she, for the most part, admits her errors with grace and good humor even while completely mortified by them.

I still have a problem with Mr. Knightley who is 37 or 38, even Austen can’t say for sure. Emma is 21. Mr. Knightley always talks about watching Emma grow up and even says he’s loved her since she was a girl. Isn’t that just a bit creepy? Plus, for 95% of the book he acts like he, to put it in a vulgar way because I am no lady, has a stick up his butt. Or maybe he’s a robot? No, it’s a stick since he eventually does display enough human feeling to pass the Turing Test. Mr. Knightley has all the reserve of Mr. Darcy without the wit. Even when he does declare his love for Emma and begins to act like a living person, I still can’t picture them as married. I mean, he has spent the whole book frowning at Emma, correcting her every wrong and expressing his displeasure when she violates social rules that I can’t imagine he would behave any differently once married. How insufferable to have a husband who is always right and always correcting you on everything! Since Mr. Knightley is moving into Hartfield so as not to upset Mr. Woodhouse, I frankly fear for Emma’s sanity, trapped in a home with a hypochondriac and a control freak.

What won me over with the book is the tight plot. Austen is a pro with the red herrings. All the twists and turns of who likes whom is delightful. And since the story is told mainly through Emma’s eyes we are fairly limited to her view of events which means we believe the wrong things too unless you’ve read the book before like I have and know what happens or you are an extra perceptive first-time reader. The clues are all there. Even more fun, since this is Austen we know there will be a happy ending; there will be weddings. But we are kept in suspense for most of the book about who will be marrying whom. It’s all so expertly done.

These last six years rereading one Austen novel every year have been enjoyable. At first I thought when I was done I should do it all over again, but no. Much as I liked it I think I will wait a few years before doing it again. That I will do it again I am quite certain.

I’m a couple chapters in to On Reading by Patricia Meyer Spacks and I am loving this book! I want to tell you about the chapter on rereading Jane Austen. What a delightful chapter it is too!

Spacks wonders what it is about Jane Austen that “everyone” rereads her and why people don’t reread Dickens or George Eliot or other great novelists quite like they do Jane. Of course there is no definitive answer to this and Spacks doesn’t really try to answer it because “everyone” is going to give a different explanation.

While traveling in China in 1980 Spacks met a young woman who was fluent in English and told her she loved English novels. Spacks asked who was her favorite? Jane Austen without a moment’s hesitation came the reply. The woman said she liked Austen for her irony, wit and grace.

In New Haven Connecticut, Spacks met a group of Holocaust survivors who met regularly to read Austen aloud to each other. They read the books over and over. To them, Austen represented civilization.

After the last encounter, Spacks reread Emma and, perhaps influenced by the New Haven group, saw in the book for the first time how in some ways it really is about civilization as well as moral development. The influence of experience between readings of a book is one thing Spacks finds recurs over and over in rereading. One is and isn’t the same person who read Emma the last time. Our past reading informs our present reading, our past self informs our present self, but there have been layers added:

let me suggest that the experience of rereading creates a palimpsest of consciousness. A manuscript that has been written on over and over, retaining traces of each earlier stage: that’s what our minds become in relation to Emma, or any other literary work repeatedly encountered. Our past readings inform our present ones; our past experiences inform our interpretations.

And maybe because she reread Pride and Prejudice for her rereading project, she noticed, for the first time how rereading makes an appearance in the book itself and is vital its outcome. Elizabeth reads and then rereads Darcy’s long letter multiple times. It is through her rereading, Spacks, suggests, that she is able, to change her view of Mr. Darcy:

She wanders the lane for two hours, reading and pondering, ‘giving way to every variety of thought, reconsidering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so important.’

The rereading of Darcy’s letter, says Spacks, “becomes an adventure in self-knowledge.” Spacks also suggests that Austen later hints, when Darcy tells Elizabeth that he hopes she has destroyed the letter because he dreaded her having the power to read it again since he said some things in the letter “which might justly make you hate me,” the outcome of Elizabeth’s reading and rereading could have been different. The outcome depended on what Elizabeth as a rereader brought to the text of the letter.

Interesting, yes? I’ve never managed to pinpoint it, but every time I read Pride and Prejudice I always worry that maybe something will happen and Darcy and Elizabeth won’t fall in love. Maybe I am unconsciously picking up on the things that Spacks discusses about the letter. Not sure. Will have to reread Pride and Prejudice and find out.

What I am sure of is that if you are an Austen rereader you will want, at the very least, to read the “A Civilized World” chapter in On Rereading.

by Marcia Peterson

Have you ever read an old piece of your work, something from way back, where it seemed as if the words were written by someone else? Reading it again, weaknesses stand out in ways they did not before. Perhaps plenty of good writing is there too. Either way, it's distance from your work that provides the new and helpful perspective. By allowing enough time to pass, you can experience a neutral reading of your writing projects, allowing you to clearly see what to change to make your work the best it can be.

For how long do you need to set something aside before looking it over again? It varies according to the type of writing. In my prior career I wrote lengthy business letters, which I printed out and proofread before deciding they were good to go. With especially long or complicated correspondence I'd wait until later in the day to send it and to my surprise, I'd sometimes find one or two errors that were invisible to me just hours earlier. With other types of writing, such as essays or articles, I've noticed that it can take a few days or weeks until the work can take on the strange otherness that allows me to read it fresh. This new, impartial reading almost always points to places to revise or tighten up to makes things better.

"The more time you allow between writing, rewriting, and rereading, the more objective you will be about what you've written," David Carroll says in A Manual of Writer's Tricks. He recommends a specific waiting period for certain kinds of work. Here is his recommended schedule:

*When writing any report or work of nonfiction: Do not reread it the next day.
Wait at least three days. A week is better if you have the time, and two weeks
better still. Then reread and correct.


*When writing a short story: Wait at least a month before rereading it and rewriting it.


*When writing a novel: Finish it, correct it, re-write it, and put it away for six
months. (An entire year would buy you even more objectivity, but that's asking a
lot.) Then take it down, read, and revise as required.

(C) Copyright wow-womenonwriting.com Visit WOW! Women On Writing for fresh interviews, news, How Tos, and writer's markets. Enter the WOW! Quarterly Flash Fiction Contest Open Now!

October's been a crazy-busy month for me, and it's not even close to over! Will November be different? I'm not sure. I'll be working the usual weekend days at the library. I'll be taking a trip to Michigan for my dad's retirement and my oldest friend's wedding reception. And there's that whole Thanksgiving thing.

And even though after doing National Novel Writing Month in 2006 I resolved never, ever to do it again because of how exhausting and stressful it was, in the past week I've begun to reconsider. "Wouldn't it be a marvelous way," I'm asking myself, "to jump-start this new idea I've got?" The jury is still out, but if I succumb, I'm going to reel the blogging back.

I've also been thinking for a while that I'd like to take a break from reading children's and YA lit in my free time. I'm thinking November would be a good month for that, too. A couple of months ago I bought two of my favorite "adult" books, My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok, and The Hundred Secret Senses, by Amy Tan, with the intention of rereading them. And half a million people have recommended I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. And at some point I wrote down Little, Big, by John Crowley, because I heard about it somewhere. Any other grown-up books I should add to that list?

And getting waaaay ahead of myself, I've started thinking ahead to maybe road tripping through the North Central U.S. next spring. Before we got sidetracked by our trip to England (which was lovely and novel, and I absolutely don't regret it), I had my heart set on driving across North Dakota and visiting Teddy Roosevelt National Park, dipping into eastern Montana and Wyoming, and circling back through South Dakota. Or the other way around, I'm not picky. The Crazy Horse Volksmarch coincides with my birthday, which seems just too perfect to pass up. Hmmm...

While inexplicably lying awake in the middle of the night, I decided I need to buy more new books. I should do it to support a business I love and want a piece of. I should do it for the good karma. I should do it because there are actually a lot of books I'd like to have on hand to lend to friends and family when they ask for suggestions.

Historically, the main reasons I haven't bought many new books were:

a) The price. But now that I'm a grown-up with a "real job", I can pay off a new hardcover book with an hour or so of work. Awesome!

b) The space. We already have dozens upon dozens of books boxed up in closets because we don't have the shelf space, and I've been telling myself, "No new books until we move to a real house." But who knows how long that will be? Screw it. I'll banish more books to the closet if that's what it takes.

c) My own peculiar desire to buy only books that I have already read and want to reread. I've been this way since I was a kid. I didn't feel like I properly owned a book unless I'd already read it at the library and then decided it was worth spending my birthday money on. But I can currently name a dozen books that qualify, so what what am I waiting for?

A related issue I've been mulling over lately is my lack of time, in my current reading routine, to reread books. When I was a kid, the shelves built into my bed's headboard were reserved for my all-time favorite books: the Prydain Chronicles, the Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising series, Robin McKinley's books, Mildred D. Taylor's books, Madeleine L'Engle's books, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Giver... These were all books I read three, and probably six or more, times over.

Since coming to work in a library, I've had such easy access to thousands of books I've never read before, and I've been trying to stay abreast of new books. I haven't taken the time out to reread old favorites. I'm thinking of reserving a few weeks this summer to take a break from new (or new-to-me) books and revisit the old.

Of course, knowing my habit of putting at least one book on my library reserve list every time I go through my blogroll, I doubt that will last more than a couple days. But maybe having some shiny new/old favorites on my shelves will help.

Got writers block? I'm going to fix you up in two simple paragraphs.

Method number one: Go to a press conference. Just put on a suit and tie, and show up at any pre-arranged media event. Tell them you are a journalism student; they’ll let you in, feed you free food, give you a fat press packet and probably put you on television. 

You will slip behind the imaginary wall of television, seeing how stories get choreographed into news--this revelation alone could launch a thousand novels. I attended a news conference yesterday, it inspired Christmas metaphors and fun prose.

Method Number Two: This unique solution came from our buddy PeteLit, I've been meaning to link to it for weeks. He maps it in a simple equation: Gin + Greyhound = No More Writer's Block.