Reading books more than once

    

 I'm reading George Eliot's "Middlemarch" for the 3rd time, in The Modern Library edition with the mercifully short introduction by A.S. Byatt.

Eliot's such an astute writer that everything she says of women could also be said of men, which is not to say that she does not discern or communicate the differences--she does--but is to say that her authorial perspective is such that a reader of either sex will recognize something about herself or himself in the other.

And, as in all books worth reading more than once, there is more there than in the previous reading.

I read Stendahl's "The Red and The Black" once a year for five or six years. Approaching middle age, with a family, a career etc., I needed to feel Julian Sorel's passion and the consequences of his ambitions. As I aged, Madame de Renal and Mathilde de la Mole became more sympathethic.

"Madame Bovary" is a book I've read twice, and Flaubert a writer who it's now quite evident is as eloquent about our time as he was of his. "The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletariat to the level of idiocy acheived by the bourgeoise" he wrote somewhere, but not in "Madame Bovary."

I've read "Anna Karenina" twice and "War and Peace" once, "Tom Sawyer" twice and "Huckleberry Finn" once.
I made it through Joyce's "Ulysses" on the seventh or eighth try while backpacking in The Sierra's and only after reading Ellmann's bio at the recommendation of Tim Reynolds. I bought "Finnegan's Wake" and Joseph Campbell's 'key' and gave the project up after one sitting, unable to read two books at the same time.