On Rereading
I have always been not just a reader, but a rereader. I read fast, so I don’t have the feeling that time spent rereading is wasted because it will prevent me from reading as many new books.
When I was younger, I had to reread. I could never get enough new books to keep up with how fast I’d plow through them. We’d go to the library and I’d check out a stack of books, only to finish them all after two or three days, with nothing else new until our next visit. So anything I liked would get read a few times.
Now, I reread because when I read, it’s almost entirely for pleasure. So by picking up a book that I already know I like, I know that I’ll enjoy reading it. It doesn’t feel repetitive because generally some time has passed between readings of a book. Even with a book I really loved, I will remember probably 30% of the details two years later. If I reread it, I’ll pick up more. By the fourth or fifth reading, which only happens with books I really love, I know most of the book. Obviously, some books are worth knowing this well, and some aren’t.
A somewhat more interesting mystery/psychological thriller. The twists and turns of this one actually were surprising. And the dysfunctional family is so disturbing that it keeps things interesting. Ultimately, though, this book mostly frustrated me. The narrator is just as screwed up as the rest of her family, and I just wanted her to pull herself together, at least a little bit.
I think I saw this on a best mysteries of the year list somewhere, so I added it to my library hold list. For a book billing itself as a mystery, everything that went on seemed pretty obvious from the very beginning of the book. Unreliably narrator has a probably crazy sister who thinks her husband killed their son. Not so surprising when she does turn out the be crazy and the husband probably did kill the son. I guess it was supposed to also be a psychological thriller, but everything about it seemed so obvious that it was mostly boring.
Bank is a writer who gets lumped in the chic lit genre, probably because her protagonists are single women. But I enjoyed both this book, and The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, her previous book. Both books are of the novel in stories type, where a series of stories are all about the same character. This helps solve my primary problem with short stories—not long enough for me to remember them later.