Life is short, your to-be-read list is long, and the new summer releases are calling your name, so why would you want to read any book more than once, much less four or five times?
Well, I’ve just finished rereading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for the eighth time, and let me tell you, nothing has given me more insight into the craft of writing—and possibly life itself—than rereading Woolf’s masterpiece.
I know I’m not alone in my love of rereading or my devotion to a single book. A poet I know shared on social media that if her house ever caught on fire she’d grab—along with the children’s baby pictures—her high school poetry anthology, with its loopy schoolgirl marginalia, which is now held together with rubber bands.
In her book Reading Like a Writer, the novelist and critic Francine Prose writes: “In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and reread the authors I most loved. I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.”
To be honest, I didn’t think To the Lighthouse was a masterpiece the first time I read it. Nor did I much enjoy it. At 17, I struggled to follow the basic plot beneath Woolf’s digressive stream-of-consciousness prose and multiple points of view. But a professor whose judgment I admired once told me it was his “favorite of all time.” So a few years after that first attempt I picked it up again, and to my surprise I discovered not only that I understood the events of the novel perfectly well but that the characters suddenly stood out in hyper-realistic detail as if they had been painted by a Dutch master. There was Lily Briscoe, a single young artist struggling to remain true to her avocation. And Mrs. Ramsey, the archetypal mother (we never learn her first name) of a large brood, wondering if her life’s choices had been the right ones. And James Ramsey her son, an overly-sensitive child who is thwarted in his greatest desire: to sail to the lighthouse he sees beyond his living room window. I would have known those individuals had I passed them on the street. Woolf renders even the minor members of her large ensemble completely, with only a few deft brushstrokes, as if she painted them from life.
Another year, my greatest takeaway was the novel’s brilliant structure: two accounts, set ten years apart, of a family’s day at the beach, and in between the two is an interlude, “Time Passes,” told from the point of view of their shabby beach house. This became the basic architecture for a short story of my own, years later.
This summer, when I revisited Woolf’s novel, all those literary elements fell away—plot, character, structure (they are all so familiar to me now!)—and I was able to focus instead on the language. As a writer in the midst of drafting my own novel, I wanted to understand how Woolf’s prose works at a sentence level to spark such pleasure every time I return to its pages: the repetition of her words, the rhythm of her sentences, even her punctuation!
Take this line: “when all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.” I wouldn’t change a single word—a single colon—in that absolutely perfect sentence. It makes me feel in complete sympathy with the character who thought it: an insecure and impoverished young academic who is utterly caught off guard by his platonic love and admiration for Mrs. Ramsey, a much older woman. Writing lines that tap into my soul as this one does is one of my writing goals for the coming year.
Rereading this novel has given me much more than the pleasurable hours I’ve spent reading it. (How many hours now? 40? 50? An entire work week for sure.) It opened up for me a life-long passion for Woolf’s writing, not just her novels, but her essays, her letters, her diaries, as well as biographies about the entire Bloomsbury milieu. It gave me intimate insight into the life of a writer and the opportunity to learn at the feet of a master of the craft.
Along the way, I have discovered myself between its dog-eared covers. I have read this book so many times now, and at so many different stages of my life, that I have read it as a frustrated child like James Ramsey, a struggling artist like Lily Briscoe, and a long-married mother of many children. When I revisit the novel now, I read to understand who I am, who I have been, and who I might become.
Is there something magical about To the Lighthouse? Well, to me there is, obviously, but I know it might leave another reader cold—as it did the first time I read it. I’m not suggesting you run out and buy your own copy right now (although do at least give it a try sometime, OK?). But there must be a book you have read, that you deem worthy of being read more than once. Other books I have personally reread and enjoyed for various reasons include Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and Pride and Prejudice. (My fellow Kernelists, Natalia and Neidy, have also reread that last one.) If you need more suggestions, Francine Prose lists more than a hundred re-readable books at the end of Reading Like a Writer.
But do give yourself the license to ignore “this summer’s best picks” as well as the TBR pile threatening to topple your nightstand in favor of picking up something you read once, long ago. Does it speak to you now as it spoke to you then? What new insights—not just into the writer’s craft but into the soul—does it reveal to you today?
My kernel of advice: Find a book worth rereading, and read it again and again and again.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
This week Sarah read a fascinating essay by Dan Sinykin in the New York Times about the late Cormac McCarthy’s highly unusual career trajectory, from a niche novelist whose books never sold more than 2,500 copies to one of the biggest international publishing sensations of the past 25 years. She also read and was utterly delighted by George Saunders’ newest short story “Thursday” from a recent issue of the New Yorker, which prompted her to revisit her favorites from his latest collection of short stories, Liberation Day. “Sparrow” is understated yet surprising and moving. “Love Letter” prompted her to consider if one of her (failed) short stories might finally work if revised as an epistle. And “The Mom of Bold Action” made her cringe and cackle with self-recognition. She also highly recommends his substack,
, and his book on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.This week Natalia got back on her reading game. She finished The Mars Room. Its tactful weaving in and out of various retold stories gave her structural inspiration for a novel draft from years ago. She finished listening to Circe. And she started How to Be Both by Ali Smith. So far she loves the beautiful language combined with the substantive core of a mother and daughter who do not mince words.
Shelby took things easy this week as she tended to her mental health. She did start the new season of Black Mirror. While she thought the first episode “Joan is Awful” used a familiar reveal, she didn’t mind it—and she of course loved Annie Murphy’s performance.
Neidy has been on a submission spree this week. She sent out stories to eight journals and is finishing applications for an Elizabeth George grant, a Yaddo residency, a Tin House workshop, and a Key West workshop. She knows the only way to take advantage of these opportunities is to apply. In between submitting and applying, Neidy found time to take her kids strawberry picking. While enjoying the sunshine and berries, she was reminded of this quotation from Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way, “As artists, we must learn to be self-nourishing.”