. . . and Rereading

As I've grown older the ratio of my rereading to reading books for the first time has increased, partially due to the fact I've already read a lot of books, and partially from the realization I usually get great joy (and only occasional disappointments) from rereading.  Because I've usually read other related materials since my original read, rereading tends to give me more insight and see more connections, and sometimes reveals flaws I had not recognized the first time around.  The passage of time can also result in the rereading having a different impact.  I first read the Lords Of The Rings trilogy as a teenager and then reread it at the age of 50 when the movies were released.  Both times I recognized it as a monumental achievement, but the sections that emotionally resonated with me the most at 50 were often different from those when I was much younger.

Here's some of the rereading I've been up to more recently.

Fiction

During the first year of Covid, I decided to read for a second time the twenty volume series by Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin novels, of which the first is Master and Commander (also the title of the splendid movie adaptation of the novels and main characters; Russell Crowe is the embodiment of Lucky Jack Aubrey, Paul Bettany less so as Dr Stephen Maturin).  Introduced to the novels thirty years ago by a friend, I quickly read the first 10 or 12 and then waited each year for the next volume up until the time of O'Brian's death in 2000.  This time I read the entire series within six months which gave me a different perspective and better sense of the flow of the story.  This is simply the best set of historical novels I've ever read.  It is as though O'Brian is writing them in the early 1800s; his treatment is consistent, not giving an inch to modern ideas or thoughts.  These characters exist fully in their time. I plan on a third go round in 2030.

Nero Wolfe, the massive, sedentary detective, who rarely left his Manhattan brownstone in the course of solving crimes with the assistance of his mobile staff, including Archie Goodwin, who narrates the tales created by author Rex Stout, was a favorite of mine as a teenager.  This time I picked up The Black Mountain, an anomaly in the series, as Wolfe reluctantly leaves home to return to his native Montenegro to bring a miscreant to justice.

In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Bruce Chatwin wrote a series of sometimes fact-based but semi-hallucinatory books including The Songlines, about aboriginal Australians, and The Viceroy of Ouidh, about Brazilian slave traders in Dahomey (both of which I recommend).  On The Black Hill is the complete opposite; set in one place in the English borderlands of Wales, it tells of the life of two farming brothers and not a lot happens, at least on the surface.  A beautifully written tale about harsh lives relieved by rare transcendent moments.

A while ago I also reread six Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, written between 1939 and 1953, the first of which is The Big Sleep, a great read though I still don't understand the plot.  Doesn't make a difference as you read Chandler for his writing and Marlowe's dialogue, which inspired this THC post.

I'm currently making my way through The Rumpole Omnibus.  Horace Rumpole, or Rumple of the Bailey, was the creation of English barrister John Mortimer, who followed his adventures, love of poetry, puns, and the law, and the encounters with his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, through several books in the 1970s and 80s.  It's like revisiting an old friend.  Immortalized by Leo McKern in the BBC adaptation.

Non-Fiction

In 1828, young Crauford Tait Ramage, then tutor of the sons of the British Consul in Naples, set off on a solo two month walking tour of southern Italy.  His account, published forty years later as The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy was edited and reissued in 1987 as Ramage In South Italy, which I first read in the 90s and reread last year.  The Italy Ramage toured was little-known, even to many on the peninsula, the towns and villages desperately poor and isolated, many still perched on hills back from the coast because a mere thirty years had passed since the thousand year threat from Saracen slave raiders had finally abated.  I love travel literature like this, which I quoted from in a 2013 post on Paestum, and that written by the likes of Patrick Leigh Fermor, Negley Farson, and Eric Newby.

A recent conversation with a friend about the truth and myth surrounding the Alamo led me to reread a slim volume by North Carolina State history prof and Texan native James Crisp, Sleuthing The Alamo.  What I wrote about the book in 2014 in Part 2 of my Remember (My Visit To) The Alamo series still holds:

Sleuthing The Alamo is an outstanding way to learn about how historians do their job.  Crisp takes the controversy around Crockett's death along with an alleged racist speech by Sam Houston and brings you along for the ride as he traces the origins of various stories and documents, going back to the primary sources to get to the truth.  It's a short, but very illuminating book written in an engaging personal and non-academic style.

Crisp also draws on his personal history to illuminate the role race and ethnicity play in how the Alamo is remembered in different ways since 1836. 

A brief passage in Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American Southwest inspired my investigation into, and long post on, Henry Lafayette Dodge.  Now that I've spent a few years living in the Southwest a rereading seemed timely and I drew even more from the book the second time around.  My original reading and move to Arizona prompted me to other read works which have enriched my understanding of the region, its history, and its peoples, including The Spanish Frontier in North America and The Mexican Frontier 1821-46, both by David Weber, No Settlement No Conquest by Richard Flint, the story of Coronado's expedition of 1540-42, and The Apache Wars by Paul Hutton.

In 1938, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union issued what became known as the Short Course, a history of communism and the Bolshevik Party, for use in the Soviet educational system.  The editor in chief of the Short Course was Josef Stalin.  In that regard Martin Amis' 2001 book, Koba the Dread (Koba was Stalin's nickname back in his Georgian youth), can be read as his Short Course history on the rule of Lenin and Stalin from 1917 to 1953.  Lengthier books like The Gulag Archipelago and the novel Life and Fate provide much more detail and insight into that regime, but my recent rereading of Koba leads me to believe it is not a bad starting place; it's like reading Lenin and Stalin's Greatest Hits, except it's recounting a horror show.  Along the way, Amis wrestles with his father's earlier infatuation with communism and his good friend Christopher Hitchen's remaining faith in Trotsky and Lenin (which he eventually backed away from).

Koba, along with two other relatively short books, can be used to describe why the Soviet Union failed.  Koba covers the mass murder phase from the Bolshevik counter-revolution in 1917 to Stalin's death in 1953.  Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, one of the oddest and memorable books I've ever read, explains how the post-Stalin era with its optimism that a completely planned economy could succeed, came crashing down in failure by 1970, while Russia and the Idea of the West by Robert English explains how a new generation of communists, including Mikhail Gorbachev, realized how desperately behind the Soviet Union was compared to the West, and how their own country was responsible for starting the Cold War.