Randi Kreiss

With books, you can and should go home again

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On one level, it’s a matter of clearing some closet space. On another, it’s a signal to let go and move on. Finally, I need to do this so that my old friends can rest in peace and I can go forward with memories of our time together.

As we speak, I am tossing out hundreds of folders of notes on all the novels I have reviewed in my book groups. For many years I have been conducting book discussion groups, and I will continue to do so, but the clutter is overtaking my office. My personal M.O. is to take notes, download and print research and keep a separate manila folder for each book I review. So it’s time to thin the flock of folders and keep aside a few I intend to re-read at leisure.

I remember the first book I reviewed was “Cold Mountain.” As a rookie reviewer, I overcompensated, and that folder alone contains about 50 pages of notes. The most recent book I discussed was “The Orphan Master’s Son,” a stunner so disturbing that I may not be able to read it again — ever.

As I look back at this collection of literary research, I think of these books as more than good reads, intellectual exercises or immersions in different worlds. Many of them feel like old friends, with whom I traveled the same path for 300 or 400 pages. When you read a book a few times, take notes and then talk about it with five or six different groups, a certain familiarity with the words and the story and the characters develops.

When I get up from writing this column, I will indeed throw away most of these folders, but before I do, perhaps a word or two about the best of them for your own reading list. I should add, consider rereading those you’ve met before. As we get older and our world changes, so does the encounter with a book. For example, consider a modern novel, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” by Mark Haddon. It was a great read, and an illumination of the world of autism, when it was published in 2003. Now, if we read it again 12 years later, our experience is informed by all the new research on autism and by the Broadway production of the book. Everything changes everything, so picking up a book we’ve read before is familiar, yet all new again.

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