Rereading is a ballast

Holding steady on the shortest days

Mandy Brown

Longtime readers may recall that I am an avowed fan of rereading—not only reading a book you once read in college, but getting to the end of a book and flipping immediately back to the first page, or rereading something you only just finished a week or month ago. That kind of rereading brings you closer to the text, lets you see things that a single read cannot reveal—like walking the same path through the woods each day until you can name every root and shrub and tree, every bug and bird and beast. It also fills you up with the work, with the words and the people and the worlds, so that you can call upon them when you think, when you narrate your past and present and many possible futures.

It calls to mind what Zadie Smith said recently, about how “all mediums modify you.” Every book, every post, every pod and tweet and piece—all of them change you in some way, because we cannot help but change. Rereading then is a kind of ballast, a way of anchoring yourself in the works you want to be changed by, making you less likely to swing and twist in response to every wave and particle that comes your way. The more our media fracture and splinter into a million sharp and targeted blades, the more I want to read and reread. I’m convinced it’s more than an escape; it’s both fortification and fight, both a refusal to accept things as they are and the power to change them—one page, one sentence, one steel-toed word at a time.

Here, then, are the books I am turning back to now, in a time when I need both steadiness and readiness. I share them in the spirit of recommendation but also as an invitation to make your own list, to gather your own armor and weapons and shelter for longer days and weeks ahead.

Rereading

Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on a planet called Winter, and involves a nearly impossible trip across a glacier during the coldest days of the year. So it’s good reading for a winter break. Of the radical gender dynamics in the book, Le Guin writes, “Yes, indeed the people in it are androgynous but that doesn’t mean that I’m predicting that in a millennium or so we will all be androgynous, or announcing that I think we damned well ought to be androgynous. I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weather, we already are.”

I turn to Le Guin the way many people turn to religious texts, so I cannot help but reach for more than one of her works. Always Coming Home is one of at least two utopian tales in her oeuvre, and sadly the least remarked upon. The story concerns a people who may live in far future California, after the industrial age has torn itself apart, after the seas have risen, after the machines have built their own city. It does not follow the usual form of a novel and so seems to have displaced a lot of readers who have no patience for the different ways that fiction can show up—or, perhaps, the ways that what we take to be the truth is, at certain times of day and in certain weather, also a kind of fiction.

John Crowley’s Ka tells the story of an immortal crow who has walked alongside and conversed with humans since we made—and threw—our very first spears. It’s a story of death and rebirth and travel to the underworld and back, but also of the vast world-changing that humans have wrought in our many thousands of years. And, perhaps, of the changes yet to come.

Susana Clarke is best known for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell—a magnificent Victorian tale of both magic and the dawn of the industrial age; I’ve read it more than twice. But this month, I’m reaching for Piranesi, a shorter and in some ways stranger book about a man who lives in a house, and is cared for by the house, and who finds himself at home.

Hild and Menewood are the first two (of a promised four!) books in which Nicola Griffith weaves the tale of the fierce Saint Hilda of Whitby, a women who apparently lived in the early Medieval period and became known for her wisdom and counsel to kings. At one point, Hild’s people wonder if she herself will become king, and she says, “Kings die. With a sword in their hand if they’re lucky and a sword at their neck if they’re not.” Which is perhaps a word of caution to those who would be king today.

Babel-17 is a deeply weird and brilliant tale from Samuel Delaney, following Rydra Wong—a poet, a captain, an erstwhile cryptographer, and a burgeoning telepath. Wong is asked to crack a code, only to discover that it isn’t a code at all, but a language, and one that changes how—and what—the speaker thinks. On the eve of her journey, she says, “Most textbooks say language is a mechanism for expressing thought…But language is thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language.”

And last but not least, Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman series asks a number of questions, among them, what does colonialism look like when all the evidence of its happening has been lost or erased? And, what does it mean to speak the truth always, even when the truth is unreachable and unknown, perhaps unknowable and unthinkable? But also there are dragons and battles and sharp-tongued swordswomen, because we all deserve a good time now and again.

To brighter days,
mandy

A Working Library is a project to explore the intersections of reading, technology, and the nature of work. Browse all sixteen years of the archives, subscribe, or forward this to a friend—because friends are a ballast on the darkest days, too.