Yes

I re-read constantly. Because there are just so few really terrific books one can fully love that it behooves one to go back to something adored and treasured. Because writers often spend years and years carefully constructing and structuring the worlds of their books, perfecting the prose so that the story of its style--which always hovers in and around the plot and characters-- may be so finely wrought it can only be grasped completely with multiple perusals. Because it's so wonderful to re-visit books over a lifetime, seeing how they strike one at this or that emotional landmark. When reading, for instance, Anna Karenin or Madame Bovary as a youngster you may find yourself immediately drawn to the title characters' defiant, desirous rebellion against the status quo; as you grow older, though, their actions can begin to seem frighteningly reckless or delusional; the ironies about the kinds of things the women think they want for themselves may begin to show out around the edges; eventually the author's profound and nuanced insights about the possible versus the imagined, how humans tend to behave en masse versus genuine individual morality, the sentimental crudity of accepted truisms versus brash straightforward sensitivity can emerge with a fullness and maturity that makes a book a living, breathing, bleeding, pulsing body. The sophistication of this kind of reading simply would not be possible with one time off at, say, eighteen or twenty, when all you want is something that shocks or tells you to shrug off the boring past of dull childhood.

joseph

Norman, Oklahoma