Some books have to be read twice.
And some books shouldn’t be read once.
Though it’s only after you’ve read them that you find out which one is true for you and for that particular book!
There are all sorts of reasons for reading books twice. With ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler it’s to find out what the hell has gone on during the novel. I took it as the only English language book on a holiday to France. At the end of the holiday I was brown and I knew who dun it. Though that information has slipped out of my memory now, so perhaps I’ll have to read it again!
‘Catch-22’ you re-read because it is darkly funny, and laugh out loud funny every time you read it. ‘Winnie the Pooh’ has to be re-read because who can take in philosophy of such complexity at a first reading? ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a drug and sometimes you just have to give in to a benign habit. The best short stories by Saki, O. Henry and Maugham always delight no matter how many times you read them.
All of the above are classics read and reread by millions but there are personal favourites too, odd things that may not be to the popular taste but give an individual pleasure which is sometimes difficult to explain unless you are talking to yourself: ‘Old Saint Paul’s’ by William Harrison Ainsworth; The Book of Jonah; ‘The Age of Austerity’ edited by Michael Sissons; The Lion Book of Religious Verse and The National Curriculum.
Apart from the fact that one of those is not necessarily one of my favourites, let us continue and think about ‘Great Expectations’. A book well worth re-reading for all sorts of reasons but one in particular. I think that Dickens does have a real perception of what it means to be a child. When I read the novel when I was very young I had no problem in imagining a person like Miss Haversham living a few streets away from me in Cathays in Cardiff; I was able to sympathize with Pip’s horrified realization that he really wasin peril when Magwich told him that he wouldn’t even be safe if he pulled the bed clothes over his head! Reading the novel as an adult gives an entirely different perception. I’m glad that I have both readings.
For some reason I felt drawn to re-read ‘Father and Son’ by Edmund Gosse (1907). My paper copy is still locked away in storage, but I did have an electronic copy on my e-book reader.
My memory of this book was of an autobiographical account of an impossible childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century where the parents were members of a narrow bigoted religious sect (The Plymouth Brethren) and the poor boy had a horrendous childhood deprived of normal experiences and instead was chained to a microscope producing intricate drawings for his ‘scientist’ father.
This reading was very different. There was same suffocating horror as one imagined oneself growing up in that household, but this time as I read through I sensed a real attempt on Edmund Gosse’s part to emphasise the genuine passionate concern by his parents’ for his development. It was also easier as an adult to pick up the irony with which Edmund Gosse wrote, so the two newish perceptions made this a much more satisfying read.
Gosse also emphasises what a strange boy he must have appeared to others and what a prig he was. His pride at being admitted to the adult section in his religious group at the age of only ten is described in a less than spiritual way and his poking out his tongue at the youngsters who had not made it was disarmingly honest.
When the final break comes with his father it is described at first in measured terms but Edmund cannot keep the rancour out of his final assessment when he describes his father’s lack of compromise in his expectations for his son’s complete acceptance of the tenets of the sect with which he was associated.
It is a touching working out of a difficult childhood in a way in which is interesting, cathartic and compelling.
If it’s true.
The power of this ‘autobiography’ is essentially contained in its adherence to the facts which comprise the upbringing that Edmund describes.
In a book which I haven’t read, ‘Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse’ by Ann Thwaite is published by Faber, Thwaite questions the factual baisis of ‘Father and Son’. She quotes Henry James (a friend of Edmund Gosse) who once said that Edmund had “a genius for inaccuracy." She also quotes TH Huxley who said, "autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be."
This is not merely extra interesting information, it strikes at the heart of the book. If this is not autobiography but literature in the same way that ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Sons and Lovers’ combine autobiographical elements with a constructed story then my attitude will change in some sort of subtle way.
I will still like the book. Who cannot be drawn to a description of a family reading of the bible where Edmund says, “In our lighter moods, we turned to the ‘Book of Revelation!’” Or when describing his father’s relentless praying: “It might be said that he stromed the citadels of God’s grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them.” I also like Edmund’s description of refusing to try and evangelize his friends by saying that he “let sleeping dogmas lie.”
Edmund wrote this autobiography twenty years after his father had died, and he obviously structured what he had to say by artistic manipulation and with the advantage of considerable hindsight. But for me this remains one of those books which define a certain approach to a life which illustrates the dilemma of the generational divide made worse by extremism and a sort of emotional tyranny.
And worth a re-read, perhaps after I have read Thwaite’s book!
And some books shouldn’t be read once.
Though it’s only after you’ve read them that you find out which one is true for you and for that particular book!
There are all sorts of reasons for reading books twice. With ‘The Big Sleep’ by Raymond Chandler it’s to find out what the hell has gone on during the novel. I took it as the only English language book on a holiday to France. At the end of the holiday I was brown and I knew who dun it. Though that information has slipped out of my memory now, so perhaps I’ll have to read it again!
‘Catch-22’ you re-read because it is darkly funny, and laugh out loud funny every time you read it. ‘Winnie the Pooh’ has to be re-read because who can take in philosophy of such complexity at a first reading? ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is a drug and sometimes you just have to give in to a benign habit. The best short stories by Saki, O. Henry and Maugham always delight no matter how many times you read them.
All of the above are classics read and reread by millions but there are personal favourites too, odd things that may not be to the popular taste but give an individual pleasure which is sometimes difficult to explain unless you are talking to yourself: ‘Old Saint Paul’s’ by William Harrison Ainsworth; The Book of Jonah; ‘The Age of Austerity’ edited by Michael Sissons; The Lion Book of Religious Verse and The National Curriculum.
Apart from the fact that one of those is not necessarily one of my favourites, let us continue and think about ‘Great Expectations’. A book well worth re-reading for all sorts of reasons but one in particular. I think that Dickens does have a real perception of what it means to be a child. When I read the novel when I was very young I had no problem in imagining a person like Miss Haversham living a few streets away from me in Cathays in Cardiff; I was able to sympathize with Pip’s horrified realization that he really wasin peril when Magwich told him that he wouldn’t even be safe if he pulled the bed clothes over his head! Reading the novel as an adult gives an entirely different perception. I’m glad that I have both readings.
For some reason I felt drawn to re-read ‘Father and Son’ by Edmund Gosse (1907). My paper copy is still locked away in storage, but I did have an electronic copy on my e-book reader.
My memory of this book was of an autobiographical account of an impossible childhood in the second half of the nineteenth century where the parents were members of a narrow bigoted religious sect (The Plymouth Brethren) and the poor boy had a horrendous childhood deprived of normal experiences and instead was chained to a microscope producing intricate drawings for his ‘scientist’ father.
This reading was very different. There was same suffocating horror as one imagined oneself growing up in that household, but this time as I read through I sensed a real attempt on Edmund Gosse’s part to emphasise the genuine passionate concern by his parents’ for his development. It was also easier as an adult to pick up the irony with which Edmund Gosse wrote, so the two newish perceptions made this a much more satisfying read.
Gosse also emphasises what a strange boy he must have appeared to others and what a prig he was. His pride at being admitted to the adult section in his religious group at the age of only ten is described in a less than spiritual way and his poking out his tongue at the youngsters who had not made it was disarmingly honest.
When the final break comes with his father it is described at first in measured terms but Edmund cannot keep the rancour out of his final assessment when he describes his father’s lack of compromise in his expectations for his son’s complete acceptance of the tenets of the sect with which he was associated.
It is a touching working out of a difficult childhood in a way in which is interesting, cathartic and compelling.
If it’s true.
The power of this ‘autobiography’ is essentially contained in its adherence to the facts which comprise the upbringing that Edmund describes.
In a book which I haven’t read, ‘Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse’ by Ann Thwaite is published by Faber, Thwaite questions the factual baisis of ‘Father and Son’. She quotes Henry James (a friend of Edmund Gosse) who once said that Edmund had “a genius for inaccuracy." She also quotes TH Huxley who said, "autobiographies are essentially works of fiction, whatever biographies may be."
This is not merely extra interesting information, it strikes at the heart of the book. If this is not autobiography but literature in the same way that ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Sons and Lovers’ combine autobiographical elements with a constructed story then my attitude will change in some sort of subtle way.
I will still like the book. Who cannot be drawn to a description of a family reading of the bible where Edmund says, “In our lighter moods, we turned to the ‘Book of Revelation!’” Or when describing his father’s relentless praying: “It might be said that he stromed the citadels of God’s grace, refusing to be baffled, urging his intercessions without mercy upon a Deity who sometimes struck me as inattentive to his prayers or wearied by them.” I also like Edmund’s description of refusing to try and evangelize his friends by saying that he “let sleeping dogmas lie.”
Edmund wrote this autobiography twenty years after his father had died, and he obviously structured what he had to say by artistic manipulation and with the advantage of considerable hindsight. But for me this remains one of those books which define a certain approach to a life which illustrates the dilemma of the generational divide made worse by extremism and a sort of emotional tyranny.
And worth a re-read, perhaps after I have read Thwaite’s book!
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