What to Read During the Heat Wave
It's hot out and my brain can only handle so much. So I've been re-reading.
Welcome to another edition of Amateur Bibliotherapy, my newsletter about book-y things. Use this Google Form at any time to tell me about what you’re reading—you might be featured here or on my Bookstagram! I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that I may make a small commission if you make a purchase through my affiliate links. That commission will be donated to Welcome To Chinatown before the year’s end.
Happy Monday! After I switched to sending newsletters every other week, I realized that would mean delivering a futile dispatch to you on July 4th. Instead, I took advantage of the brief reprieve from a heat wave and stepped outside. Tajin and fruit are summer MVPs.
I’m in the blessed but precarious position of living in an area with high vaccination rates and low COVID-19 cases. As your resident summer hater, this ultimately means that I feel compelled to gallivant after 16 months of solitude despite the fact that it has been so hot outside that my brain is melting. Did you know that when the temperature is over 90 degrees, its negative impact on happiness is greater than the consequences of being widowed or divorced? I think I’ll keep staying inside and scarfing down spicy dried mango from Sahadi’s by the half-pound, TYVM.
The (Re) Reads
I am nearly done with Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, but took a brief break to do some re-reading.
Unfortunately for me, my classic re-reading choice is almost always the second book of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series (A Court of Mist and Fury or ACOMAF, if ya nasty). It’s a perfect storm of enemies-to-lovers steaminess, fantastical world-building and war-mongering, and a delightful leading man. I re-read it (or at least excerpts of it) once every six or so months, just to feel something stir in the spot where my heart is supposed to be.
But Anna, you say, there are so many good books in this world. What’s the point of re-reading the ones you’ve already read? How do you find the time to read new books AND re-read old ones? Wow, thank you so much for asking. Have you found no joy in watching re-runs of old TV shows? Have you not listened to the same songs again and again? There is a certain comfort and even excitement in the known quantity, but also the promise of discovering something new when you thought there was nothing else to learn. Old books are like old friends. (And a lot of people felt similarly about this early in the pandemic.)
Vladimir Nabokov said that “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a re-reader.” While I am reticent to bring Nabokov into any element of my life, this idea has become an oft-cited and quippy refrain that I think about a lot. He posits that reading something the first time is preoccupied with the “process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about” more than it is about appreciating its artistry. Only in re-reading can we fully “behave towards a book as we do towards a painting,” in that we are able to connect all of a book’s details and survey it as a full and final product.
I find some truth in what author Tim Parks calls Nabokov’s preoccupation with the “total knowledge of the book, total and simultaneous awareness of all its contents, total recall.” And as much as I hate agreeing with the author of Lolita about anything, I appreciate what Parks summarizes as Nabokov’s philosophy of re-reading a handful of books as: “knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension.” As a kid, I exclusively listened to the audiobooks of the Harry Potter series (on CASSETTE!) and took pride in being able to recite bits of the book right along with Jim Dale himself, inflection and all. This might explain why English majors typically are tasked with memorizing passages through the course of their study—they’re expected to internalize elements of prose through memorization, theoretically to glean more meaning.
But I think philosopher/psychologist Riccardo Manzotti polishes Nabokov’s idea into a better example of what I like about re-reading:
When we perceive something new for the first time we cannot really perceive it because we lack the appropriate structure that allows us to perceive it. Our brain is like a lock maker that makes a lock whenever a key is deemed interesting enough. But when a key—for example, a new poem, or a new species of animal—is first met, there is no lock yet ready for such a key. Or to be precise, the key is not even a key since it does not open anything yet. It is a potential key. However, the encounter between the brain and this potential key triggers the making of a lock. The next time we meet or perceive the object/key it will open the lock prepared for it in the brain.
Parks and I agree that the virtue of re-reading hinges on this lock-and-key phenomenon, particularly since I don’t exactly sit around re-reading only the ~fanciest~ of literature to engage in the most ~artistic~ of projects. Instead, I reread primarily “to remember the excitement of feeling that particular lock turn in my mind.”
The Buys
During a recent downpour, I went to the Book Revue for the first time in many moons. And what a boon! I picked up discounted copies of:
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, because I’m enjoying Breasts and Eggs so much and I read a great piece about it in The New Yorker like the good little nerd that I am;
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, because Exit West is one of the best novels I read last year; and
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub, because Jess grabbed a copy and so we shall buddy-read it :)
That’s all from me this week. Get out and enjoy Negroni Season to its fullest!