Page 24 - Seniorstoday July 2022 Issue

First Person

Old books, old friends

Vandana Kanoria gives us a glimpse of the magic that rereading encapsulates

“A good reader, a major reader, an active these books morph and shift bringing
and creative reader is a rereader.” Nabokov fresh insights and interpretations The
New books pile on my bedside enticing best books are the ones that open layer by
with their shiny smooth pages and covers. layer of loveliness and wisdom and that’s
They lie in “save to cart” on Amazon and what makes the act of rereading so rich
haunt the shelves of my library. I pull out and transformative. Anne Bogel advocates
one, read, and most of them are great books, for rereading favourite books again and
which I know I shall go back to them. But again - “A good book, when we return to it,
after weeks and months of reading the new will always have something new to say. It’s
and noteworthy, my eyes, as if pulled by not the same book, and we’re not the same
a familiar hand land on the tattered and reader.”
battered pages of books loved and read
several times over the course of my life.
They are “ toolkits that you take up to fix
things, from the most practical to the most
mysterious, from your house to your heart.”
Returning to a book you’ve read multiple
times can feel like chatting with an old
friend. There’s a welcome familiarity —
but also a feeling that time has changed
you both. But books don’t change, people
do. We change as we grow and experience
life. With each rereading the worlds in

24