Reading With My Past Self: A Year of Revisiting Books

About the time I turned 48, I started to worry about Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I always thought a crisis brought about by an author would happen in my professional role as a book publicist rather than my personal identity as a reader. After all, with 25 years in this job, I’ve read a lot of books, and I’ve worked with a lot of authors. But turning 48 and realizing I’m probably at—or have already passed?—my mid-life point made me worry that I might not get to experience some of my past literary pleasures again. What if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, and I never got to re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude, the book I’ve long named my favorite?

By not re-reading it, was I just making sure I’d always think about it in the same way, forever? What if I read it again and…I didn’t enjoy it? And what about all those other books of which I have such fond memories? Would I feel the same way, if I read them again?

So began a year-long project of re-reading all the books I could think of that I especially enjoyed reading earlier in my life. Some rules had to be set: I couldn’t re-read anything I had first read in the past decade. I also ruled out children’s literature since that would make the list far too long (sorry, Winnie the Pooh, but I’ve read your stories more times than I can count). I had to go for the deep cuts.

As I started my re-reading in January 2024, echoes began to manifest in the culture at large. I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the spring just as the PR push was beginning for the publication of Marquez’s final, undiscovered novel. When I was in the middle of The Woman Warrior—which was the first novel we read in my “Women & Fiction” class sophomore year of college—the New York Times ran an interview with Maxine Hong Kingston, now 83 years old, about her life, her career, and the significance of the very book in my hands.

Not all the connections between the books and real life were positive. In July, I had thirty pages left in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman when the latest allegations about sexual abuse by Gaiman surfaced in the news. I first read this book when my now-husband and I were beginning to date, so it has a special place in my heart, but I finished those thirty pages pretty darn fast. Now-cringey literary and language choices in some of the books marred an otherwise terrific reading experience: IT by Stephen King, I’m looking at you. Which is a damn shame: the story is a captivating American saga, and we all know those kids could have just kissed instead of having underage group sex.

It was also sobering to realize that part of the reason I found Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison so mind-blowing when I read it in college was because before then I hadn’t read that many books by Black authors. I polled a couple of high school friends; we might have read The Color Purple in 11^th grade, but we aren’t sure. And that’s the only book by an author of color that we thought might have been assigned. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, work by writers of color was not part of the curriculum or “the canon,” to our literary detriment.

Cause-and-effect reading choices cropped up throughout the year. I don’t know that I would have recalled how much I enjoyed Possession if A.S. Byatt had not passed away; what a marvelous re-read that was. I have a clear memory of reading it at Jones Beach one summer in my twenties. This time around I was not at the beach, but caught snatches of time in May to immerse myself in the story, toggle between voices and times and settings, and then extract myself to emerge back into the real world.

There were so many unexpected delights in this roster of books. I did not expect to love Little Women by Louisa May Alcott as much as I did, being transported right into the time and place of the March family. I knew I would enjoy the Katherine Hepburn memoir Me, since I was a bit obsessed with her and her films in my teen years. But I didn’t realize how much an older me would appreciate the wisdom she had gained about her life from her then-vantage point of 84 years of age.

Similarly, when I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers in 2000—I still have the hardcover that Doubleday Broadway gave every employee upon the book’s release—I identified with the protagonist, who was trying to make his way in the media world as a twenty-something. In 2024, I’ve got two great kids at home, one of whom is the same age of Eggers’ brother when their parents die. Reading this book as a mom and an adult was, appropriately, heartbreaking.

As with any endeavor like this, there were a couple of misses. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene was just too Catholic for this lapsed Catholic, and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens was too slow, despite my usual affinity for the author. I’m also pretty sure that one book I re-read was not the book I meant to re-read. Maybe someone can help me figure this out?

The book I re-read this year was Washington Square by Henry James, which I thought I first read in my “Political Novel” class in college. But it bears only a slight resemblance to the book I remember. The book I remember is indeed a novel about a young woman debating whether to marry—but the man she’s interested in is an up-and-coming politician, and it’s much more of a social satire than James’ book is. If you have any ideas, please let me know. I’d be very grateful.

I started to manufacture some nice synergies when reading certain books as the year went on. I re-read both The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy—which I first owned by snagging paperback copies off the “free books” table at the Random House offices—on a trip to visit my dear friend who I met when we started our first jobs in those very offices. Pre-election stress led me to re-read the delightfully trashy 1987 David Bowie biography Stardust, which I first devoured at 13 or 14, checking it out from our small-town public library. I learned some things about other worlds and other lives from that book, let me tell you; all the more reason for us to support our local libraries.

As a multi-decade publishing worker, I must note that it was fascinating to see the different ways books have been described, marketed, and sold over the years. Interview with the Vampire (published in 1976, but I first read it before the movie came out in 1994) is touted all over the paperback as a sexy read, but it’s definitely among the more chaste vampire novels still in print today. Paging through my paperback copies of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and White Teeth (the first book that made me laugh out loud while riding the NYC subway), which were both first published in 2000, it was bittersweet to see the pages and pages of review praise from newspapers and magazines that either no longer exist or no longer review books.

So, what about Marquez? I re-read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I loved it. It’s among the eight (so far) books I re-read this year that would make it on to the next version of this list in another 48 years when I undertake a second re-reading project. The fact that I can’t name one favorite book after this year is, I think, a good thing. I’ve grown as a reader, a human, and a book lover. There is more than one of me turning the pages when I sit down with a new—or old—book, and bringing all my past selves along for each story is a powerful feeling.