Book #7: Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman

I read Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman a few years ago, and I truly loved it. I'm really a fan of reading about reading (although, you know, you can only do so much of it at once), especially about how much people love reading and why. For that same reason, I enjoyed this Rereadings book. The book is a collection of essays written by different writers, about old books they'd read and loved when they were younger, and revisiting them many years or decades later to see how they held up and how they felt about them. It was fascinating to see what books the writers had loved and why, and to see their reactions later in life. It seemed like a pretty common theme to many of them that they had loved these books wholeheartedly when they first read them, but upon revisiting them they realized many of the flaws in the writing or assumptions made by the author, which made it hard for them to love the book as much as they had originally. That progression seems kind of inevitable; I liked what Fadiman herself had to say in the introduction--when you read the book at first you are focused on the plot and the story, but when you reread it you focus more on breaking it down and analyzing it. But it still seems sad to think about losing the unabashed love that you once had for a book (although I know that's happened to me too already).

All in all, I enjoyed this book, but not as much as Ex Libris. I might have liked it more if I had read more of the books that the authors were writing about, but I'd only read one or two, actually. I have a few more books about books that I've got checked out from the library, so I'll probably be on this reading-about-reading kick for the next few days.