Of Re-reading Books There Is No End, by Ben Jeapes
Photo by Oziel Gómez from Pexels. I’ve been contributing to this blog for nearly eight years, which is only a notable anniversary if you count in base 8. However, my second post was drawn from my then-recent reading of Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers: " Doris Lessing and Miss Lydgate ", about finding the balance between making your writing as good you can, and just publishing it, and this comes to mind now because I’m just starting to re-read that book. Do I expect the text to have changed much? Not at all. Do I expect the experience to be different? Oh, yes – hugely. The first time around I already knew the basic story, because I had seen the TV version with Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter. Previously I had watched all the Ian Carmichael depictions of Lord Peter Wimsey, so I knew generally about Wimsey’s world. However, it was the first of the series I had ever read. It stood on its own, on its own merits, and needed no knowledge of what ha...