No rereading has yet given me a clue to the meaning of the first eight lines of Boneland.
And yet, rereading it now, it's Carver that The Executioner's Song irresistibly suggests, at the sentence level.
One reader, a court reporter, confessed that she planned to "feign sickness for the next three to six days so I can lay in bed and reread all my NR yet again".
And yet on rereading, it comes across as a more nuanced and sensitive portrait than I remember; if indeed I ever actually read it, as opposed to reading about it.
Yet, in rereading Susan Sontag's 1964 essay, "Notes on 'Camp,' " it occurred to me that Mr. Armani's recent collections satisfy many of her points, in particular that the audience doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions: "The work tells all".
Yet as I reread key sections, and especially the final chapter, I noticed how much the book's ideas owe to Don DeLillo's fiction — and how much in common "Pure Language" has with the virtuosic opening section of his "Mao II," in which another crowd gathers to accept the word of a potentially dubious prophet, in this case at a mass wedding of Moonies held at Yankee Stadium.
And yet, we can reread the headline, WORST SHOOTING IN US HISTORY, over and over without feeling much shock, or even surprise.
Once you've finished the book and have accumulated a sizeable glossary of the most commonly used Nadsat words (or better yet, memorized them), reread the book and mentally replace the Nadsat argot with real tangible English words.
Yet my latest rereading was a reminder that great books travel alongside you, seeming to grow as you do.
