Books become you

After my younger brother received his bachelor’s degree in business during spring commencement at one of Minnesota’s state universities (this was around 1990, several years before the Internet), he looked at me and grinned. “Not once during my four years at this place,” he bragged, “did I step foot in the library.”

Knowing him, I wasn’t shocked. I shook my head, sighed, and have, in the years since, occasionally considered what his gloating implied. Maybe his priorities were inclined toward more conventional undergrad amusements—playing Super Mario, watching Duran Duran music videos, or playing Quarters. Maybe he and other business majors considered any intellectual pursuit that involved wandering through a library’s stacks irrelevant to the objective of business: making money. Maybe the coursework required for his degree was less rigorous than it should have been. Or maybe he was just a philistine, disdainful of books and certain he already knew as much as he wanted to know about everything but the mundane details of making a living.

Of course, the question he and many other people ask —probably with sarcastic emphasis and a derisive snort — is this: “Why should I read a book?” On the surface, this may seem a mostly innocent query. The attitude that provokes it, however, is the same as that which results in endless challenges to and bans of American classics and contemporary works. Among those books continually attacked are Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Morrison’s Beloved, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Walls’s The Glass Castle, and dozens of others, books that have changed me and opened my eyes to worlds and wonders beyond the small rural public school I attended and outside the confines of middle America where I’ve spent much of my life.

And when that attitude of people or governments narrows and their question is pinched to “Why should I read that book?” the consequences become increasingly treacherous. Burning specific books — such as those in the Harry Potter series or Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses — predictably either precedes or results from threats against authors, like those directed at J. K. Rowling, and physical assaults, such as the near fatal knife attack two years ago on Rushdie in Chautauqua, NY; the 1991 stabbing death of his Japanese translator; and the 2015 terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, where eleven people were murdered. So, if you still insist on asking that potentially dangerous question, “Why should I read a book?” just stop here (though you likely already have and are now looking at online pictures of curvy girls in bikinis standing before enormous pickup trucks) because I have no time for your blatant intolerance, your disinterest in discovery, or your willful ignorance.

However, for those of you still here, the more relevant question is this: “Why should I reread a book?”

We rarely raise a similar question regarding music albums, movies, or TV shows, partly, I suppose, because hearing or seeing them again requires less time than rereading a book. However, though revisiting a book often takes longer, it also usually offers (business majors, are you still listening?) a greater return on investment of time and likely has a greater lasting effect on the reader than replaying music or movies has on the listener or viewer.

So, why exactly should we reread books? For several reasons, any one of which would justify my following a writer word by word, page by page, chapter by chapter through his or her best work again:

To see in light of the book’s ending what I did not or could not see at the beginning.

To understand and be moved again by details of others’ internal lives, the desires and secrets and regrets rarely revealed by the people in our daily lives.

To listen to another’s voice without feeling the pressure or expectation to respond. I can listen and even close the book to consider what’s been said, in effect interrupting the speaker without insulting or hurting his or her feelings.

To remind myself of who I was when I first read Walden or One Hundred Years of Solitude and to compare that with who I might now be. Books do not change; people change.

To recognize and sympathize with those whose physical, political, historical, and cultural circumstances are drastically different from my own.

To be a part of conversations I do not or cannot have with my brothers or the neighbor waving the howling leaf blower. With the waitress counting tips at the Bar & Grill, the farmer wading through the snouts and bristles of fat hogs, the long-haul truck driver absent two front teeth, or the hairdresser tangled in endless gossip. With the sunglassed Harley driver blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd, the football coach whistling wind sprints, or the post office clerk scoffing at piñatas on the new sheet of stamps.

To absorb the words and worlds of others, to internalize them, and to become new again.

To relive that which is worth reliving. To again stand amid the cloud of yellow butterflies that foretold the arrival of a young man. To be guided into a violent foreign landscape and pushed to realize my contribution to its calamity. To bicycle to the poet’s house with his mail and a question, to cross the baking Dakotas on a motorcycle in the wake of a Chautauqua, or to sit a horse on the banks of the R´Io Grande and plunge south into the brown swirling channel. To regret unleashing on the world a weapon of unfathomable power and striving to undo the harm. To understand the terror of dogged pursuit, the sorrow of sudden loss, the mystery of mortal choices, and the bliss of nature’s company.

To ache. To witness. To wonder. To delight. And to experience again others’ lives in order to enlarge our own. To make not just a living but a life worth living.

Addendum

Here are some of the books I’ve read and then felt compelled to reread. Many will likely draw me back to their pages again. I suspect that some will have a similar effect on you:

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me

Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking

Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine

Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides

Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True and The Country between Us

Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude

John Gardner’s Nickel Mountain

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World

Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic

Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar

Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World

Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Passenger, and Stella Maris

George Orwell’s 1984

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front

E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News

Antonio Skármeta’s Burning Patience

Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience”