Read, and read again

Most people who know me well, know at least this one, obvious truth about me: I’m obsessed with reading. It’s not really that I flaunt it (aside from my “I heart my Library” bumper sticker), it’s just that it’s part of who I am, like my brown eyes, the scar on my cheek, and the strange way I laugh at times when I’m not mindful of it. It’s just me.

I can’t remember my life before books. It started off with my mom reading to my brother and I every evening when we were little, graduated into hours and hours spent at the library growing up, and culminated into the present day where I will make emergency runs to Barnes and Noble at 10 pm when I find out a favorite author released a new book. Love makes you do crazy things.

Reading has taught me about other cultures, other places, strange and wonderful people, both real and imaginary, and opened my mind to ideas and concepts I had never considered. Books that I love lead me to even more books, and sometimes I’m saddened by the idea of how many books I will never get to experience . . . which is a little odd, I will admit.

But one of the things I love especially about reading is re-reading. People tell me all the time that they never re-read a book, even if it’s one they really enjoyed, because they’re bored with reading it again. That is a completely foreign concept to me! I have always re-read my books, especially the ones I loved. Every time I do, it’s like visiting a place that I loved, immersing myself in a story that’s both familiar and newly exciting. The words on the pages don’t change, but I have changed since I read it last. Parts of it will resonate with me in a different way than they did the first time. I have read books that I really disliked the first time and put them away for awhile. Then I re-read them a few years later and found that the problem wasn’t the book, the problem was I wasn’t ready to read it yet.

One of my favorite books, by my favorite author, I have read far too many times to count. It’s an old paperback and it’s literally falling apart at the seams. I can remember with clarity the first time I read it and felt like the author was speaking in my own, personal language. Every chapter was a gift and I loved it from beginning to end. I must have been 12 the first time I read it, and 12-year-old Dacia and 28-year-old Dacia are two very different individuals. But when I read it again this weekend, I felt the same joy in my favorite parts, and found a few new things to enjoy that I hadn’t grown into before. Books are a gift in this life, and re-reading them is a gift that grows each time.

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”

- Robertson Davies