I have been spending the last few rainy evenings with "Rereadings" edited by Anne Fadiman, author of another favorite of mine, "Ex Libris", and formerly the editor of "The American Scholar", a feature of which was apparently essays on rereading. (I mentally smack my forehead, as I’ve long thought it would be a great idea to review older books and classics, and now it seems that I’ve missed some eight years’ worth of the very thing!). "Rereadings" is a collection of seventeen of these essays, from authors as diverse as Vivian Gornick, Pico Iyer, Philip Lopate, and Sven Birkerts, and others — but all readers, and all able to vividly convey the delights and, it must be said, now and then the disappointments of rereading old favorites. Almost all of the titles are familiar to me from my years of shelving and cataloging untold numbers of them, but I have read less than half, and it is interesting to see that even though I’ve never read, say, the Helen Dore Boylston "Sue Barton" series, Katherine Ashenburg’s sense of amazement at both the liveliness of the writing and the stereotypes are still familiar to me.
And this is, by the way, a handsome little volume. The dust jacket is simple and elegant, a sibling to "Ex Libris," and the edge is trimmed to a tidy curve that fits the tip of my finger perfectly. It is true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but certainly it is very pleasant to read a book that satisfies the eye as well as the mind. (I have now spent far too much time this morning trying to eliminate the distortion from the digital camera of the solid lines around the cream-colored boxes on the dust jacket. Please be assured that the lines on "Rereadings" are not dashed, but straight and clean, as on "Ex Libris." As much as I would like to spend any number of hours figuring out why the one comes out right and the other doesn’t in the same photo, time, tide, and the kindergarten bell wait for no mother.)
