Thought for the day

    "Adults tend to forget - or perhaps never appreciated in the first place if lifelong non-readers themselves - what a vital part of the process rereading is for children. As adults, rereading seems like backtracking at best, self-indulgence at worst. Free time is such a scarce resource that we feel we should be using it only on new things.

    But for children, rereading is absolutely necessary. The act of reading is itself still new. A lot of energy is still going into (not so) simple decoding of words and the assimilation of meaning. Only then do you get to enjoy the plot - to begin to get lost in the story. And only after you are familiar with the plot are you free to enjoy, mull over, break down and digest all the rest. The beauty of a book is that it remains the same for as long as you need it. It's like being able to ask a teacher or parent to repeat again and again some piece of information or point of fact you haven't understood with the absolute security of knowing that he/she will do so infinitely. You can't wear out a book's patience."

    Lucy Mangan, Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading

Comments

[Readerlane]

Interesting quote. I’ve heard others say this about needing all their reading time for the new, but I disagree. If as Heraclitus said one can never step in the same river twice, perhaps one can never read the same book in the same way again. The Middlemarch I read at twenty is not the Middlemarch I read at forty or at sixty. And I don’t know about the rest of her thesis — what a shame if children receive so little patience from those around them that the only place they can find it is in a book...

[Cornflower]

I so agree about re-reading - the comfort of the familiar, or fresh discoveries within old favourites.
As to the patience bit, certainly up to the point I've got to in the book (about 100 pages) Lucy's childhood sounds lovely, so she may just be exaggerating for effect!

[Toffeeapple]

There is no shame in re-reading, I do it frequently and find things that I have missed in earlier readings. It's comfort reading sometimes.

[LizF]

There are a few books that I do re-read, Jane Eyre, Susan Hill's The Magic Apple Tree, and two favourites from my childhood Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse ( which I got banned from borrowing from the primary school library because the librarian thought I should read something else) and The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston. They are definitely all comfort reads.

[Mary Ronan Drew]

This book is splendid. I was reading it only yesterday.

[Cornflower]

Yes; I enjoyed it very much.