Worth reading twice

This is a blog about the books I enjoy rereading. They are books I have bought and lent to friends and replaced on my shelves several times, books I pick up when I can’t sleep late at night or when I am getting over ‘flu, or when I am packing to go on holiday. My tastes are those of Woolf’s common reader, eclectic but choosey, quirky but in some ways predictable enough for a bookish woman of a certain generation and background.

The books I most often reread are diaries and collected letters, books I can dip into and put aside when the moment passes. Just before I began writing here I was reading Louise Erdrich’s startling short story in the New Yorker, The Reptile Garden, in which the narrator talks about being infatuated with the lyrical but self-indulgent diaries of Anais Nin. How I loved those lurid red and blue paperback editions of her endlessly rewritten accounts of her meetings with friends captivated by her! Not somebody I’d reread now. But there are diaries I return to read each autumn — those of Sylvia Townsend Warner writing about Dorset and Norfolk in the 1930s and ’40s — and those I read in times of loneliness or adversity – Elizabeth Bishop’s selected letters, especially those from Brazil, for her gaiety and courage. Pepys, of course. And diaries about the perils of travel to inaccessible places, the travails of fiction-writing, along with diaries that detail the pleasures of observing nature. Which is why I am going to start with Kilvert’s Diary…