Reviews for Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering

The average rating for Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-21 00:00:00 Thomas Toppman I have struggled to articulate the pleasure I derive from rereading to those who wonder why anyone would bother. My rationale has always centered on the joy of revisiting characters I love, appreciation of the author's ways with language or storytelling abilities, or both. Having finished Lesser's book, whose subtitle is Rereading and Remembering, I come away with a new appreciation for revisiting beloved titles. I have always thought of rereading in terms of bringing the book back to myself and my consciousness, but she flips that and discusses bringing ourselves back to the book, a now older version of ourselves, with more living having been done, remembering ourselves and the circumstances of our lives during each visit to it, and how those visits may differ. Personalizing those visits is a wonderful quality that adds to the depth of the experience and the pleasure of a meaningful reread. Lesser's essays are not only personal musings on titles she has reread, but literary critiques that make for interesting reads themselves. From the opening essay - The First Novel - on Don Quixote, and on, she offers insights into many books I know, and visiting them with her as a guide was a nice little journey. The Tempest, The Idiot, Paradise Lost, especially stand out. Her take on Huckleberry Finn was discomfiting but that was no less than what Mark Twain intended for it. The chapter on Orwell was almost cringe worthy given that today the Senate trial on the Trump impeachment begins in earnest. The love of reading is like the love of music or movies. If you love music, you probably have a soundtrack of your life - musicians or composers you have listened to again and again over the seasons and years; if a cinephile, films you quote or rewatch for the stories, characters, actors or film makers you love. Books are unique in that they are products with older provenance - the Bible or Gilgamesh is older than any film or musical recording, and so critiques of them have accumulated over the years - centuries or millennia - that can add to our appreciation. But in the end, our relationship to the books we read are personal, and rereading them, for whatever the reason, add to the texture of our life. Lesser's book adds to that appreciation.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-09-27 00:00:00 Heidi Dudley "Nothing demonstrates how personal reading is more clearly than rereading does." --Wendy Lesser, NOTHING REMAINS THE SAME: REREADING AND REMEMBERING. Lesser, editor of a long-running literary journal, revisits books that have been important to her over the years. I was so happy to find this book. I'd heard about it back when it was first published but never actually grabbed a copy. It has come to mind on several occasions since. For some reason, I never followed through on the urge to read it. Thank goodness for Amazon's 1-click feature (so good, it's bad!) and the human weakness for instant gratification. Lesser offers great insight into how, through the books we reread, we rediscover ourselves. Or, rather, get a glimpse at our multiple selves. She points out how aspects of a book that we skimmed over at twenty might hit us right between the eyes at forty. And how memory and life experience can exert opposing pressures, so stories that comforted us at ten might unnerve our adult selves, dark connotations and troubling symbolism emerging out of the friendly scenes of our old favorites. But wait... The opposite is also true. Rereading can also act as a time machine that grants access to younger selves, to the very moment (along with a full "sense" track of sounds, smells, emotions) we first read LITTLE WOMEN or THE SECRET GARDEN. I think what I love most about this book is the license it gives readers to step back from our towering to-be-read piles and revisit books we've already known and loved. It underscores that, whatever the marketing world would like us to believe, a book is not just another product, to be consumed and forgotten.