Books that linger: why some reads stay with us
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Some books end when I close the cover. Others don’t. They stay, though I can’t always say why, and I rarely see it coming. While I’m reading them, I don’t know they’ll turn up six months later while I’m doing something else.
The books that have lingered longest for me are rarely the ones I expected. I’ve reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein more times than I can count, and each time I finish it, I’m sitting with a different question about creation and abandonment than the one I started with. I no longer read it as a novel so much as a problem I haven’t solved. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried followed me for a year after I first read it. The question was whether a story can be true and invented at the same time, and what that distinction even means. While I was reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, I didn’t think much about it. I thought about it constantly afterward. It did its work after I’d closed it.
None of these are my favorites in any conventional sense. I’ve admired some without fully loving them. I’m still not sure a few of them work. What made them last had nothing to do with whether I’d recommend them; it had to do with what they opened while I was reading and what didn’t close afterward.
The first reading plants something. The later readings show me what grew. When I first read Frankenstein at twenty, I didn’t know I’d still be working out its implications at forty. I didn’t know The Things They Carried would turn out to be as much about the stories I tell myself about my own life as about what O’Brien was writing. A book lingers when it keeps making sense in a life that’s changed.
Some linger because of when they arrived. I read Cheryl Strayed’s Wild in a year when I was deciding whether to keep going with something that had cost me a lot. I can’t separate the book from that year. The book is partly the decision, and the decision is partly the book. I’m not claiming it’s great literature. I’m saying the timing mattered as much as the book.
Then there are the books that linger because they unsettled something instead of resolving it. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist does this for me every time. It isn’t comfortable, and it doesn’t become comfortable on rereading. What stays with me isn’t the possession. It’s Father Karras, a priest who lost his faith before he ever met Regan. I read it less for pleasure than for the pressure it puts on me, and I’ve gathered the books that do the same thing in Books like The Exorcist.
What makes a book linger, as far as I can tell, is fit: whether its particular question lines up with the one I happen to be carrying at the time. I can’t engineer that or predict it. I can only notice, after the fact, which books stayed. I’ve collected more of them in Books that linger: a reading list.
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