Reading and Living

The chapter I've just finished in Reading Our Lives was titled, "Reading Literature: The Interpretation of Text." The gist of the discussion was, how is the work we do creating and "reading" our own life story like reading a novel?  Or is it?  One idea I found interesting was viewing reading as a constructive act. In this view, the reader constructs meaning from the text, there is nothing actually "there" until we read it and interpret it for ourselves. Of course, this means that every reader will take a different view of the text, interpret it slightly differently.  There seems to be a lot of discussion about what is owned by the author and what is created by the reader, but I didn't find that all that interesting.

More interesting, though, was the notion that when we go back to a text, we will read it differently.  Obviously, on a re-reading we have some sense of the arc of the story, so details that we may have skipped over now seem more relevant.  We see foreshadowing in the characters' actions that we might have missed before. But, more relevant, is that we are different, both from having read the book in the first place and from the experiences we have had after the reading.  We come back to the book as a different person.

I have three books that I have read multiple times:  Two I read first when I was about 14, One is One (Barbara Leonie Picard) and Knee Deep in Thunder (Sheila Moon).  The other is a more recent discovery, Out Stealing Horses.  The first two I read multiple times after discovering them in the middle school library.  I hunted for them some years ago and was able to find copies of both, One is One is out of print. Since then I have read each 2-3 times again.  Who knows why they resonated with me so strongly.  Both dealt with themes of loss and grief, of "becoming oneself", of discovering inner strengths and peace.  There are a million coming of age stories like them, but these were the two I read and the two I keep reading.  There is a familiarity in the story, but I still cry when someone dies.  There are passages in each that I have continued to hold as touchstones, words that continue to offer solace in times of sadness and hope in terms of trouble.