Centireading force: why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

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A new project.

Centireading force: why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

Author and columnist Stephen Marche, who has perused PG Wodehouse and Hamlet more than 100 times each, extols the virtues of literary repetition

Pelham Grenville Wodehouse: 100 not out. Photograph: F. Roy Kemp/Getty Images

The Guardian Monday 9 February 2015 16.13 EST

Stephen Marche

I have read two books more than a 100 times, for different motives and with different consequences. Hamlet I read a 100 times for my dissertation, The Inimitable Jeeves by PG Wodehouse a 100 times for comfort. The experience is distinct from all other kinds of reading. I’m calling it centireading.

I read Hamlet a 100 times because of Anthony Hopkins. He once mentioned, in an interview with Backstage magazine, that he typically reads his scripts over a 100 times, which gives him “a tremendous sense of ease and the power of confidence” over the material. I was writing a good chunk of my doctoral dissertation on Hamlet and I needed all the sense of ease and power of confidence I could muster.

My supervisor, during my doctorate, which was at the University of Toronto, was a man named Sandy Leggatt, one of those rare scholars – I met very few in my sojourn among them – for whom exposure to the texts under investigation was a virtue in itself. He actually liked to read even though it was his job. He was one of the best-read people I ever met, but he was certainly the best-reread person. He would regularly do things like reread all the Greek comedies, for instance, just so he knew them. When we collectively decided that I was going to work on early modern tragedy, he brightened and informed me that there were only about 200 of them, so I would be able to read them all.

That took me about a year. There were a lot of duds. There were a lot of great surprises, too. But by the time I decided to read Hamlet a hundred times it seemed comparatively easy. At least I knew I was going to be reading one of the good ones for two or three months.

The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of cliche. “To be or not to be” is the Stairway to Heaven of theatre; it settles over the crowd like a slightly funky blanket knitted by a favorite aunt. Eventually, if you read Hamlet often enough, every soliloquy takes on that same familiarity. And so “To be or not to be” resumes its natural place in the play, as just another speech. Which renders its power and its beauty of a piece with the rest of the work.

My centireading of The Inimitable Jeeves was less intentional. At the age of 40, my father picked up the whole family to start a PhD in semantics at the London School of Economics. For that year, I attended a public school in Cambridge, enduring all the alienation that a chubby boy who had never called anyone “sir” and possessed an “American accent” (I am Canadian) could reasonably expect. Fortunately that year, 1987, the UK government banned corporal punishment in the English school system. That was about the only good news about school for me that year.

Every Sunday, my family would load ourselves into a car – my father, my mother, my kid brother and I – and drive out more or less randomly to see what England had to offer. In western Canada where I grew up, it had been perfectly standard to cross three or four hours of prairie to visit a relative for lunch. From Cambridge, an hour in any direction would land us in a church from the reign of Queen Anne, unspeakably ancient to our new world eyes, or some grand estate, the luxury of the residence always offset by the cheapness of its gift shops, always reeking of scones and plastic guidebooks, or the ruin of some abbey, the stuff of mossy legends. During these trips, in the tiny English car, we would listen to cassettes of The Inimitable Jeeves, read by Jonathan Cecil.

The psychology of my love for The Inimitable Jeeves isn’t exactly hard to understand. As we rolled through that strange country, laughing at the English with the English, the family was both inside and outside. My associations with The Inimitable Jeeves are as powerful as they could possibly be, a fused sense of family unity and childhood adventure. The book is so much more than just a happy childhood memory. In such ways, books pick us, rather than the other way around.

The more I’ve read The Inimitable Jeeves, the more inappropriate my theories about it have grown. Famously, George Orwell described Wodehouse as “a political innocent” in his defence of Wodehouse’s brief collaboration with his German captors in the second world war. But The Inimitable Jeeves is deeply political, at least after you read it a hundred times. At its core is the relationship between Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, a perfect encapsulation of the absurdity of the class system – Wooster, the master, is an idiot, while Jeeves, the servant, is a genius.

The upper classes are ruthlessly mocked in the Wooster novels, as they aren’t in say, the Blandings novels. At one point in The Inimitable Jeeves we learn that the head of “the noblest family in England” is under the impression that he is a canary. When Bingo Little is hired as a tutor by the Glossop family, Bertie fails to see how that’s possible, until he remembers that Bingo “did get a degree of sorts at Oxford, and I suppose you can always fool some of the people some of the time”. I have thought of this line every single time I have met someone with a degree from Oxford. Not only is The Inimitable Jeeves political, it is politically effective. One may continue to believe in the breeding of the English aristocracy after reading Marx. Not after reading about the Drones club.

The class satire of The Inimitable Jeeves is balanced by a complex counter-satire, as well. The class system is absurd, yes, but attempts to reject the class system, whether through violent overthrow, as proposed by the Brothers of the Red Dawn, or the novels about romance between lords and factory girls, as written by Rosie M Banks, are even more absurd. The way of the world is stupid; the attempt at change ends up being even stupider. As political visions of the 20th century go, you could do worse. Many did.

I understand that The Inimitable Jeeves was not intended to be read this way. I am overreading, obviously, probably crazily. There is a definite affinity between centireading and madness – the assassins clutching their copies of Catcher in the Rye, the cults of various kinds poring over their various testaments. I remember a friend’s mother, returning from an extended stay at a mental health institution, who owned a copy of Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles which she had read so many times that every last word had been underlined. It reminded me of my own relationship to Hamlet. Eventually, no passage is unworthy of highlight. But what is it in these books that has even made it possible for me to read them a hundred times?

It’s not necessarily the quality. The Inimitable Jeeves does not contain the best Wodehouse story. That is either Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, which Rudyard Kipling called “the perfect short story” or Uncle Fred Flits By collected in Young Men in Spats. But there are no dull moments in The Inimitable Jeeves, no bad parts. Each plot is a novelty, without a trace of laziness. There is not a single weak verb in the entire book.

It’s not just that Hamlet is a great piece of literature, either. It’s that every scene is a great piece of literature. The hits just keep rolling out one after the other after the other: Hamlet with his mother in the bedroom, then Hamlet going mad while pretending to be crazy, then Ophelia singing bawdy songs around Elsinore. If there were a pause, I would pause. I wouldn’t keep reading. But there isn’t a pause. So I keep reading.

In both books, dense narrative tensions are never fully resolved – this, too, may explain part of their centireading appeal. Hamlet is funny even though it’s a play about madness and death. The “comic relief” everybody teaches students isn’t relief at all; it runs through the whole thing like fat in good steak. Hamlet himself is hilarious; every second line is a joke. He’s more or less a standup comedian who has taken the death of his dad as the theme of a four-hour set. The world of The Inimitable Jeeves is supposedly an ideal world, bracketed between “a slight friction threatening in the Balkans” and “disturbing news from lower Silesia.” But there are serious questions: why do Bertie and Jeeves love each other? Why can’t they talk about it?

After a hundred reads, familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow. Centireading belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading. Christmas is devoted to reading books we all know perfectly well. The children want to hear the one story they have heard so many times they don’t need to hear it again.

By the time you read something more than a hundred times, you’ve passed well beyond “knowing how it turns out”. The next sentence is known before the sentence you’re reading is finished. As I reread Hamlet now, I know as Gertrude says, “Why seems it so with thee?” that Hamlet will say “Seems, Madam? Nay it is. I know not seems.” I know as Bertie asks “What are the chances of a cobra biting Harold, Jeeves?” that Jeeves will answer: “Slight, I should imagine, sir. And in such an event, knowing the boy as intimately as I do, my anxiety would be entirely for the snake.” Centireading reveals a pleasure peculiar to text lurking underneath story and language and even understanding. Part of the attraction of centireading is that it provides the physical activity of reading without the mental acuity usually required.

I don’t read Hamlet or The Inimitable Jeeves much any more. I’m rationing them. There may come a point when I need the cool glamour of Hamlet; no doubt life will provide me with many more instances in which I again require the comforting intervention of The Inimitable Jeeves. And I’m not sure whether millireading works.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/09/centireading-force-reading-book-100-times-great-idea