Head down and hip deep into the next chapter...

[anghara]

...but just so as to keep this place interesting, here's something to think about.

rdeck just forwarded me an interview from "Shelf Awareness" with an author called Tom Rob Smith. In case he is someone whose name you are not familiar with, here's his bio as it appears in the interview:

Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and
studied English Literature at Cambridge. He worked on Cambodia's
first-ever soap opera and wrote screenplays until he started work on
the novel Child 44, just published by Grand Central. Film rights have
been bought by Ridley Scott, and Richard Price will adapt the novel.

Amongst other things, he was asked what book he might want to read again for the first time.

His reply:

I know exactly what you mean by this question. You come to the end of
the book and you feel kind of sad, like you're saying goodbye to a
friend and you can't recapture that friendship by re-reading the
book, because that's almost like looking through a photo album rather
than re-living the experience.


Oh, I so know what he means.

There are books I would love to read again for the first time without knowing the things about them that I know now and did not know when I first touched them. I can never read the Narnia books again with the same kind of innocence with which I read them when I was a child and I did not know who C S Lewis was, what he believed, and what the subtext for those books (intended or not) is or was. I can never read again for the first time the book that I remember crying over when I first read it - in translation - and understood the power that words would always have over me ("My son, my son" by Howard Spring, for those who want to know).

So, over to you folks. What's the book that you carry on your heart?

Comments

[david-chunn.livejournal.com]

My wife is the same, I think, with CS Lewis. I can't read some of Orson Scott Card's work like I did when I was a teenager. Some of it I could read again. And I can't read any of the newer stuff, but that's also, IMO, a quality issue.

I wish I could really read Lord of the Rings for the first time, as if it were a first time. If I'd read those books as a lad, I'd probably love them now. But I didn't. And now I just can't get through them at all. Loved the movies, though.

For me, there are a lot of superhero comics that I read when I was young that I thought were wonderful. I still remember the plots and themes and characterizations from the best of them. But the ones I've revisted only barely had what I remembered in them. I must have filled in a lot of blanks and expanded on those themes without realizing it. And the writing is ... well ... not good in most of them.

[anghara.livejournal.com]

...which leads to another question - is it possible to "miss a window" in which it is POSSIBLE to read a book for the first time, and love it, and if you miss the window you might never be able to read the book at all? It is interesting, what you say about TOlkien, because that isn't the first time I've heard that said about those books. There seems to be a certain magic about them, and the spell only works... once... and if you miss that window through accident or design the spell loses its potency and you are simply a different human being than you might have been had you been caught by the magic at the proper time. Not better or worse, just DIFFERENT.

There's a story idea in here somewhere if I can dig it out...

[kymbrunner.livejournal.com]

I really loved the Time Traveler's Wife and Water for Elephants of late.

I know what you mean about rereading a book you loved. You can never reproduce that first "shock" moment when something happens in a book you didn't expect, because you just can't fool yourself into not knowing the ending the second time around! :)

[mela-lyn.livejournal.com]

Oh my... The Dragonriders of Pern series and The Blue Sword. I've read those books so many times I've lost count. :) But yeah, there's that initial discovery that you lose which is so sad but at the same time, at least you can discover new things through the 3rd, 10th or 25th reading. :)

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking something like this about the last book I read, Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn. There are some stunning reveals, and some marvelous moments when the reader is just half a step ahead of the detective and wants to reach in to warn him. The narrator has Tourette's Syndrome, which provides some laugh-until-snorting moments, and those will never be quite as potent on a subsequent read.