Returning to a book you've read many times can feel like drinks with an old friend. There's a welcome familiarity—but also sometimes a slight suspicion that time has changed you both, and thus the relationship. But books don't change, people do. And that's what makes the act of rereading so rich and transformative.
The beauty of rereading lies in the idea that our bond with the work is based on our present mental register. It's true, the older I get, the more I feel time has wings. But with reading, it's all about the present. It's about the now and what one contributes to the now, because reading is a give and take between author and reader. Each has to pull their own weight.
There are three books I reread annually. The first, which I take to reading every spring, is Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Published in 1964, it's his classic memoir of 1920s Paris. The language is almost intoxicating(令人陶醉的), an aging writer looking back on an ambitious yet simpler time. Another is Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm, her poetic1975 ramble(随笔) about everything and nothing. The third book is Julio Cortázar's Save Twilight: Selected Poems, because poetry. And because Cortázar.
While I tend to buy a lot of books, these three were given to me as gifts, which might add to the meaning I attach to them. But I imagine that, while money is indeed wonderful and necessary, rereading an author's work is the highestcurrencya reader can pay them. The best books are the ones that open further as time passes. But remember, it's you that has to grow and read and reread in order to better understand your friends.
