Rediscovering Books Anxiety

First of all, the inevitable British weather conversation.

It’s a bit hot. Warm enough for you? We’re not equipped for this. I don’t mind it on holiday, but this is ridiculous. Other countries manage it. It’s fine when you haven’t got to do anything. One ray of sunshine and the trains pack up.

I think that more or less covers it.

As we all melt in whatever number heatwave this is, I’ve embarked on my annual summer re-reading rounds. I go back to books I haven’t read for decades, sometimes since my teens, and give them another go. Mostly these are books I didn’t like at the time, and want to reappraise in the light of old age. Some are ones I re-read every year because I love them, like anything by Alan Garner. The Harry Potter books used to fall into this category, because I thoroughly enjoyed them and they brought back memories of my son being enraptured when they first came out, and queuing outside WH Smith’s with my daughter at midnight, eager to get our paws on The Deathly Hallows.

Sadly, I can no longer read JK Rowling’s books, because the wonderful messages of acceptance and inclusivity which were such a part of their appeal ring a little hollow in the light of her attitudes now towards trans people.

Before anyone has a go, I don’t advocate ‘cancelling’ her, I don’t care if anyone else wants to read them, but I can’t, and I miss them.

There are some books that I don’t re-read because I’m scared to.

Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (part of her Hainish Cycle of stories and novels) and Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence sequence, changed my view of the world. I read Martha Quest, the first of Lessing’s sequence, in the summer of 1976, the year I graduated. That was also a heatwave year, and I did a lot of reading while lolloping on Aberdeen beach. My parents had moved there for my Dad’s job. My Dad was a minor cog in the oil industry, and so was, unbeknownst to him, putting all his energies (no pun intended) into creating the heatwaves we have now.

I read The Four-Gated City, the last of the sequence, after I’d moved to London and joined the rat-race. I finished it one Monday morning, reading the final few pages on the commuter train from East Croydon to Victoria. I stepped out of the train knowing I was a different person from the one who’d started reading Martha Quest on Aberdeen beach.

I’ve read pretty much everything both Le Guin and Lessing ever wrote, but I’ve never gone back to either the Hainish Cycle or The Children of Violence. A while ago I did start re-reading Shikasta, the first in Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series. That had also profoundly affected me, but this time around…it didn’t work. I’ll be honest, it often takes me a couple of chapters to get completely into a Lessing book, and then suddenly I tip over the edge and I’m seeing her characters in front of me, and thinking like them, and quite often speaking like them as well. This time, I stuck with Shikasta for about a third of the book, and then I packed it in, because I didn’t want to spoil the precious memories I had of it, and who I was, at a particular time and in a particular place.

It put me off going back to certain other books.

Books do have different meanings, for us readers, at different times. Our life experience changes us and maybe we know a bit more about the writer, which alters our understanding. But sometimes it’s like bumping into that person you knew in your early twenties, when you had the best time and you shared everything, but you lost touch, and now you’re standing in front of each other and you’re wondering what you ever saw in them. Sadly, you conclude it’s better if you just smile and move on, before you spoil all of that precious past.

And it is much less awkward bumping into someone you didn’t like back then, only to find they’re a lot more interesting, and a lot more sympathetic, than you ever realised.

Anyone else have Rediscovering Books Anxiety? Or am I just a lazy coward who prefers to cling to the memory of an old and very special relationship, rather than the threat or promise of a new one which might involve re-evaluating myself as well as the other.

Stay safe in the heatwaves. I do always feel I have to apologise for being a child of the oil industry, although it really wasn’t my Dad’s fault, he just managed supplies to rigs. Yes, the rigs that were denuding the planet of its innards. OK. I’m sorry.

Thanks for reading.

Jane