On Rereading

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." -C.S. Lewis

What a strange year it has been! It has been a year most of us have physically spent entirely at home, though, while I have been mostly in one place, I have found the time to travel very far indeed in the pages of some dearly loved and long-neglected childhood favorite books.

Rereading old loves is not a new experience for me. I revisit the Harry Potter series on a very regular basis. I also have not let a year go by without returning to Green Knowe or to A Christmas Carol. And in the heat of the past ten summers or so, I have found myself drawn repeatedly and inexorably back on an epic gothic journey through Central and Eastern Europe in The Historian. I have long been a proponent of finding solace in familiar pages and reexamining familiar words with the lens of new experience. But perhaps, since the stories I reread most often are reread most often with not that much space between readings, I have not been quite so struck as I have found myself in some of my readings this year–stories through which I have not thumbed in almost two decades.

I began the year with A Wrinkle In Time. I did this in preparation to watch the recent movie. A thing I have yet to do. The book was just too lovely. I have no doubt the movie was lovely as well, in its own way. But the vivid images Madeleine L’Engle’s words had drawn up in my mind (especially of the Murrys' wonderful house) were so specific, I wasn’t quite ready to turn them over to someone else’s interpretation. I reacquainted myself with A Wrinkle in Time and A Wind in the Door and met A Swiftly Tilting Planet for the first time, mostly while walking through my neighborhood this past winter. There was a good deal I remembered and a good deal I did not. But the thing that struck me most was the overarching theme, through all three of the books, of the importance of all the little things. A single seemingly inconsequential moment can change the course of history, and the simple act of naming can give someone or something great power or take that great power away. I honestly don’t think I understood that message as a kid. If I did, I had forgotten. But one way or another, it certainly sunk in in a meaningful way this time around.

After A Wrinkle in Time, I returned for a bit to some history and then took a sharp turn back into fiction with a long-overdue return to Middle Earth.

I first read The Hobbit when I was ten or eleven and remember slogging through it. I can’t recall if I saw the cartoon version before or after this reading, but I do know that Gollum gave me nightmares.

I first read The Lord of the Rings in anticipation of the release of Peter Jackson’s version of The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001. I was a freshman in high school, and my little group of friends were definitely library rats and nerds. We went as a group to see each of the movies on its release day (after taking our final exams, of course), and I recall countless hours spent in the library debating the books vs. the movies. I cannot say that I did not always adore the films, but I was a touch more puritanical at thirteen and was particularly incensed at the large(r) role given to the character of Arwen–just so they could have some sappy romance in a story I was absolutely convinced didn’t need it. After that initial read (I distinctly remember slogging through that as well, though I certainly would not have admitted it at the time) and the subsequent thumbings for the purpose of debate, my relationship with The Lord of the Rings transferred entirely to the movies, and eventually entirely to the one movie, The Fellowship of the Ring. Much as my younger self wanted to be an elf, I love the Shire best. I am a hobbit at heart, and the hobbits are best represented in the first movie. So that is where I stayed.

All in all it was the movies and not the books that got me through the tail end of high school. And I don’t say that lightly. Specifically, I think it was the extra features on the extended edition DVDs that got me through the tail end of high school. I watched those things every morning, and it gave me such joy to watch people on the other side of the earth building a fantasy world into a reality. I wanted someday to do the same. And perhaps for that reason, and perhaps because I remember the slogging, and perhaps because I took a bit of a turn away from most fiction reading there for a little while, The Lord of the Rings sat on my shelf in multiple apartments in multiple cities, unread and collecting dust. In all those years, I left home, finished school, moved apartments, watched my best friend move far away, moved across the country myself, went through breakups, changed careers, suffered the significant losses of my two beloved grandparents and the sale of our beloved family home, learned that I was capable of standing on my own two feet, and experienced great joy.

Then my boyfriend and I decided we were going to travel to Middle Earth. And since I am not a person to go on pilgrimage unprepared, back to The Hobbit I went. (My boyfriend, being himself, decided to start with The Silmarillion–I haven’t even made it through that one once.) I went in remembering the slog, prepared to do it anyway, and found myself instead devouring the book. Then I went straight to The Fellowship and devoured it, and then straight on through to last Wednesday when I found myself coming back with Sam to the Shire and openly weeping on the subway.

Perhaps since I have come to know the movies relatively well and could give faces to Tolkien’s countless, rhyming names, or perhaps because we rewatched the movies in conjunction with my reading the books and so I could better visualize the confusing battle sequences, or perhaps because I have simply lived a lot of life since last I read them, the story came alive for me this time. I felt it deeply from start to finish. And in revisiting the movies and all those extra features, I came to appreciate how truly loyal the filmmakers had been to the original text even when making the changes necessary to translate between mediums.

I now think I may well add these books to those most-loved tales with which I spend time every year.

All this is to say that I encourage you to scurry over to your bookshelves and take a chance on something that has been sitting there for years gathering dust. If you’re anything like me, it is still sitting there after countless moves and intermittent collection purges because it meant something to you in the first place. You may be surprised how much more it could mean to you now.