The perils and pleasures of re-reading

I've been a voracious reader all my life but I have never gone in much for re-reading. Until last year (not counting books I re-read books for school, as a student and as a teacher), I'd hardly ever re-read books for pleasure: The Great Gatsby, Mrs. Dalloway, some Ray Bradbury, some Ernest Hemingway, some Henry James. But in my retirement, in addition to catching up on books that have been piling up in the basement over the years, I have been doing some re-reading. I've probably read Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes four or five times, but a new attempt last year left me cold. It threatened to spoil my lovely memories of the book so I quit. Oddly, with one of the major characters, the dad, being an old man figure a bit like me, I thought I would find new resonances in the book, but the opposite happened--I found myself bored by the father and by the philosophizing. I will keep my Bantam paperback, bought in 1967, with me forever but I probably won't be tempted to read it again. I'll let my memories remain unsullied.

Some things I've re-read with success, finding even more to enjoy in them now. Julian, Gore Vidal's historical novel about the last pagan emperor of Rome, first read in my 20s, was one of my favorite novels and I worried that revisiting it would be disappointing (I had tried about 20 years ago and didn't get very far) but my older vantage point was actually an asset as I understood more, about the history and the philosophy, than I did back then. The same thing happened with A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. It's a post-apocalyptic story told in three parts, covering three different and widely separated time periods. A nuclear war destroys civilization as we know it, but humanity, along with religion and science, claws its way back, and soon we have an even more advanced technology that we had in the 20th century. But have we learned enough to avoid our old mistakes? I read it in college (mid-1970s) and have fond and vivid memories of stretching out on a couch in the student union building and reading it, but when I picked it up now, I remembered almost nothing about it. This time around, I liked the first and third sections very much, but the middle chunk was tedious and I almost gave up on the re-read. I'm glad I didn't. I think the first and third parts felt more like science fiction than the middle part; they also have more "world-building" going on. I'm a little surprised that it hasn't been adapted for streaming television.

I got an even bigger jolt when I re-read The Carnivorous Lamb by Agustin Gomez-Arcos. In 1984, it was a highly esteemed literary gay novel about two brothers in 1950's Spain who have a lifelong sexual relationship. In 1984, the book felt like a fever dream and I raced through it in two or three sittings. It's erotic but also political, with the fall of the Republicans and the rise of Franco after the Spanish Civil War affecting all the characters. This time, the writing style felt awkward, with a stop-and-start flow that bothered me. The erotic feel was still there, but I was surprised how little sexual description there was--it doesn't come close to being pornographic. Overall I was a little disappointed, but I was glad that the last 30 pages or so were still a bit "feverish." I've been thinking of re-reading Garcia Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, another book I remember as dreamlike, but I'd hate to be disappointed. Hence the perils and pleasures of the act of re-reading. If I could somehow clear my memories of the first read out of my head, I might be less worried about it. But the past and present experiences will always, I think, be in contention.  So I'll keep going with this project but I'll allow myself to give up on a re-read if it feels like it is spoiling the past experience too much.