The Case for Reading Backwards

By Andy — 2026-08-15 — Literary News

I walked into a used bookshop yesterday and noticed something odd. Most of the annotations were dated years apart.

The same passages underlined twice. Different margins, different pens.

There's a whole debate about whether you can really reread a book. Once you know what happens, the argument goes, the thing is done. You're just skimming your own memory. Fair enough. But Lit Hub recently collected writers on their rereading habits, and nobody seems to have got the memo about moving on.

Ed Park, the novelist, says he dips perpetually into Charles Portis—specifically The Dog of the South and True Grit. Nicholson Baker's U and I. Renata Adler's Speedboat. He's lost himself lately in the Samguk Yusa, a thirteenth-century Korean text, which is a different kind of book entirely, but same principle. The point, as far as I can tell, isn't to rediscover the plot. It's to rediscover yourself inside the book—who you were when you first read it, who you are now.

Park reread The Catcher in the Rye and Breakfast of Champions more recently. He didn't grasp the sadness in either of them as a young reader. Didn't have access to that particular sadness. So he went back. And there it was.

This business of rereading works best with writers who write about what they know—or what they've learned to notice. Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus scales beautifully on a second pass, according to the writer Jamel Brinkley. Something about how it moves between the intimate and the grand, the architecture of it. Denis Johnson's Angels less so, but Brinkley keeps going back anyway. The prose just lives differently each time.

Actually, that's not quite right. The prose doesn't change. We do.

Kathryn Davis talks about rereading Wuthering Heights across decades of her own life. Once, Romance was all that mattered to her. Cathy and Heathcliff: would they stay together? Now she reads differently. She sees what Brontë was actually doing—the way romance devours people, the toll it takes. The book didn't shift. Her eyes did.

Miranda July, who writes with a kind of wry tenderness about desire and aging, returns constantly to Alice Munro. She cries about it. Not the crying-at-sad-things kind. More-or-less the getting-older-and-noticing-brilliance kind, which happens to be the same thing. When July's novel All Fours came out—roughly at the moment Munro died, as if the universe was making a small, quiet point—July found herself in a cab in New York, feeling something besides what she'd expected to feel. Which is, she notes, very Munro. The writer leaves you room for contradiction.

The worst thing a book can do is stay the same. It means you're done with it.