Books are interesting things, aren’t they? Meant to stand alone. Between the front and back covers, there’s just you, the words from the author, and your own sense of time. DO you dive through quickly? DO you flick back and revisit some words? Do you stop when the author moves on at the end of a chapter, or finish wherever you feel?
And, interestingly, how much of what you have taken in recently comes with you. That’s my thought today.
This is because I have just finished reading an Arthur Clarke novel which mentions sandstorms on Mars, sometimes bad enough to form lightning. Before that, I re-read a novella by Peter Cawdron, which also mentions lightning storms, this time in the atmosphere of an exoplanet.
It is interesting to me that these 2 books, aside from being sci-fi, have nothing else in common yet bring up something pretty much identical in a different context. The other thing is, if I’d read Clarke a few weeks or even days later, I might have forgotten the brief reference in Cawdron altogether.
So I think it fair to say you can never read cleanly. However much each book is a new start, despite each new page or chapter being a different vantage, you’re always carrying about bits of everything else. This I think is why I reread so much, because I never know what’s tumbling about inside my brain ready to mix with whatever I am reading next, even if I’ve read it before.
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