Why re-reading

As I get older I find I finish fewer books.

Most writers I read once only. A lot of them fall into the "OK, got it" category. I understand the picture they were trying to draw, and that's that.

For other books my taste has changed. For instance, some years ago some of Cabell's books were reprinted, and for some reason they caught my fancy. He was a good wordsmith and had a pleasantly ironic style, and I went through about half of his output (university library). At some point it became a little repetitious, and I moved on. When years later I picked up one of the copies I'd actually bought, I found the style unpleasant--the irony covered a despairing core; a chocolate coating on a stale crouton. (It didn't help that I was happily married and now had a completely different idea of romance.)

But other writers I return to: in fantasy Lewis the lucid dreamer, Tolkien the rich dreamer, and Williams the dreamer of the unsee-able. Bradbury dreamed bubbles that held little worlds, Zelazny had mythic dreams, Wolfe hidden dreams within dreams; Simak's blended the alien and the grounded, and Niven... OK, I'm not sure why. At his best he uses rigorous logic to draw the fantastic stories, but so do others, and he wrote best in company with Pournelle or Gerrold. Maybe its the consistency of the alien environment--like van Gulik or Hillerman describing their alien societies.

Or maybe I just have a taste for books that look at the world with alien eyes: alien but not wrong. Achebe's look at the world from a different framework I keep, but I quickly weary of stuff that is obviously simpleminded or stupid. Berkeley of the Midwest is liberally supplied with socialist and "transgressive" art, but at the other end of the spectrum Ayn Rand is just as hard to stomach. These aren't "different viewpoints" on the world; at best they're just tiny slivers: so tiny that they're wrong. I used to read the Isthmus, but after a few years it was too trivial to predict what they'd say.

I like using different questions to partition a situation. There aren't always answers, but sometimes they shed a little light on the corners of what we mean, and make the problems more three-dimensional.

And some books describe the worlds these questions come from so well that they seem to have fresh applications each time. It helps a lot if they're fun to read.