On a similar line, I know he says, in regard to living books:
"it certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then"found on Into the Wardrobe
I also found a couple of posts on Iambic Admonit:
On Reading and Rereading
one of the comments by one of the IA blog contributors said this:
The benefits of rereading are many. C.S. Lewis said something along the lines of this: when you buy a book you're actually buying six or seven books, because you can reread it every decade, and you'll be a different person each time, so the book will say something new to you.(Yep, that's kind of how I remember it, but I still wish I could find where he said it)
A Year of Rereading
(this is a sort of liturgical year of rereading -- great idea! an obvious one is Dickens Christmas Carol and also O Henry's The Gift of the Magi; I always tend to read Dickens during the Christmas break, and for years and years I would read Flannery O'Connor during Lent)
Charlotte Mason of course, said that one reading ought to suffice, and if more than one reading was allowed, it would not develop the faculty of attention. More on this some other time. But I don't think it contradicts Lewis entirely. She was talking in the context of school readings. I remember reading that she herself reread the Walter Scott books every year so this kind of revisiting is probably the fruit she hoped for in the child educated by her methods -- that favorite, high quality books should be companions throughout life. But as a child dealing with new books one should acquire the habit of attention, and not read in a desultory way.
4 comments:
Although I agree that one should not read in a desultory way, I have been thinking for a while about the importance of rereading and the sense we have that this is somehow "inefficient". I do think that "efficiency" is what makes us question whether rereading is valuable.
But I find that each time we read things we get different things out of them. And this is because we do not read in a vacuum. We bring other experience (including other books we've read, conversations we've had, places we've been, etc) to the act of reading. And each time we read, there have been other things happening in the interim.
This is a bit what is meant by "death of the author" (though that does seem to imply the author has no bearing on the meaning which is untrue) in that the reader brings much more to a text than what the author provides. And this other stuff is important to consider.
I think you're right Willa Lewis and CM can be reconciled. I don't think CM meant not to reread a book ever rather not to have to read a passage again in order to answer a short answer question.
JoVE, my kids and I were just talking about "death of the author" yesterday, though we didn't use that phrase exactly. In this case we were talking about Shyamalan (whose movies we have been watching) and Don Quixote. Funny to run across the same concept so quickly -- I love it when that happens.
I think you are both right. ... personally, I read and reread as a child and still do now.
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention."
-Francis Bacon
My science professor said that one reads a book the first time to find out whether it is worth reading, the second time to confirm that it is, and the third time to let it soak through. Books are conversational. Having spoken to someone once about a topic doesn't mean that I have covered the breadth of their knowledge, or of my ability to ask the right questions. If they interest me, I will go back to them for information, for wisdom, and for companionship.
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