The first book I reread was in 1950, when I was 12. I had first read the book at 11, and
had fallen in love with it, and over the next few years I dipped into it again and again, and read here and there, over and over, until I knew it by heart. I had picked it out of my father's bookcase because of its bright orange leather cover and wonderful comic illustrations.

Recently (some 50 years, and thousands of books, later) I returned to it. But the adventures in
the book had been so deeply engraved in my soul that rereading brought little new to light. It was a new translation, which I found annoying, for I remembered the sentences themselves. (I who have such a terrible memory!) What I did see clearly on rereading (or re-rereading) was what the book had done for me. The author had provided me my own very private Other, a canny survivor, whose basic tactic was to present himself as, on the one hand, an enthusiastic "patriot" (which he was not), and, on the other, a "congenital idiot" (which he also, most certainly, was
not !). It was a simple enough trope, but I LOVED IT: I could be heard, during those years, cackling with pleasure, up in my room.

Later I learned that this book had served essentially the same function for a whole country, Czechoslovakia, in the period following the First World War. The book was called The Good Soldier Shweik, and Shweik had become, for the Czechs, a deeply treasured symbol of national endurance for a small people caught up in the insane affairs of their neighboring superpowers.

For me, as a boy trying to come to terms with the recent business of World War Two (which at that time had been over only a few years), this book was a pure treasure, for it turned me not only into a reader, but a rereader.

Thus when I came across a book called Rereadings in the wonderful new Labyrinths bookstore, a recent immigrant (from home across-the-street-from-Columbia) on York Street (next to Toad's), I was very taken not only with the title but with the idea behind it, which was to commission a series of personal essays by practicing writers of all kinds to write about the experience of rereading a book they had loved when they were young.

Although reading is the defining mark of developed civilizations, it is seldom attended to as such, except in the context of elementary pedagogy. Attention is endlessly diverted from the act of reading, to the thing read, the text. In such a conception, the ordering of the material is crucial, and forms the basis for that ancient art, rhetoric, and its modern descendent, criticism. But the actual reader (let alone the rereader) is nowhere to be found.

But there are many fascinating dimensions to reading, the most important of which is the specific set of needs which reading meets for the individual reader, and the range of ways in which a given text responds to these needs at different periods in a reader's life.

One secret to this book's very high quality is that Anne Fadiman, the editor, turned out to be also the book's midwife, for though she is now the new Francis Writer in Residence at Yale, in her previous incarnation, as editor of The American Scholar, it was her highly innovative idea to commission these essays and to shepherd them through to print. They are her babies.

A bonus attraction, which I picked up from her Yale bio, was that one of the courses she offers undergraduates is "Writing about Oneself." That called to mind the first course of my own devising that I ever taught, some 30 years ago, which I called "The Language of Identity." We read all sorts of exciting confessional literature, starting with Rousseau and ending with Henry Miller and Jean Genet. The readers were to write about themselves, letting their reading rub off on their writing (which it did, in spades !).

It was a very successful idea for a course, and this is a very successful idea for a book.

Since the writers here represented were almost all born in the couple of decades following World War II, Rereadings can stand as both a record of the literary love-affairs of precocious literary teens in the '60s and early '70s, as well as a mature and, occasionally, rueful reassessment of these often violent enthusiasms.

It seems that the aspiring adolescent writer selects, from the luscious and alluring array provided by literature, a new or supplementary parent/grandparent as an ego-object to model himself or herself on. It is notable that they all seem to have known they were to be writers, and that they were right: between them they have produced a small library, some 65 books, together with countless articles, essays and reviews.

Catnip for those whose taste for fiction has, perhaps regretfully, abated, Rereadings marks a rare event, the invention of a genre, within the broad and fruitful domain of memoir.

Fadiman has taken as her own mentor the greatest of English essayists, William Hazlitt, and in particular his essay "On Reading Old Books." She effortlessly lives up to her chosen ancestor. Her writing is of the purest variety: graceful, yet pithy, personal, yet without a trace of sentimentality. Beyond her talents as an essayist lies an even rarer talent, that of a truly great editor. The magazine she edited was showered with prizes during her tenure, and the writing she managed to nurture, if this collection is anything to go by, is of the very highest quality, blessedly free of any of the manifold contaminants emanating from the theory-laden academy. As one of her writers remarked to a journalist: "You always felt so princely because she treated your writing so seriously.''

I asked Fadiman what principle had governed the order in which the essays were presented. Her reply was typically clear. She wanted the first and last pieces, which deal with Salinger and the Beatles, respectively, to be clear and strong and deal with texts she imagined most readers would themselves be familiar with. She wanted the middle arranged as she would arrange a dinner party: folks who would enjoy sitting next to each other. Not similar, but congenial.

I do not propose to list the 17 contributors or their topics. There is an easy way for you to find out for yourself, particularly since this little future classic is now out in paper. I just want to suggest that if you are an inveterate reader, then this is one of the most delightful ways I can imagine of discovering new books and essays to be on the lookout for! There are, amazingly enough, no weak links at all, for these essays are, every one, written out of sheer passion. (The $500 the American Scholar paid was just a token, a fraction of the ordinary fee.) If you would like to know whom to read, then have a look at these delicate essays, and you will soon begin to keep an eye out for Allegra Goodman, Luc Sante, and all their dinner-party friends.

The Good Soldier Shweik turned me into a person who read for joy. As a consequence, I became, early on, protective of the obscure impulses which lead me from one book to the next, for the totally unexpected book turns out, more frequently than one might imagine, as Rereadings has, to be just what I was needing!

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