Two kinds of readers

Early in An Experiment in Criticism (1961), C.S. Lewis makes a distinction between two kinds of readers. He calls them the few and the many, as one group is much larger than the other. While it would be easy to accuse Lewis of elitism, he takes pains to point out that neither group is morally superior to the other. It's just a difference in how people view books. And some people, because of changing circumstances in their lives, may float from one group to the other.

Lewis suggests four ways to tell one group from the other. I propose to discuss these four ways in separate installments, spread out over the next few weeks.

First, he points out that most people never read the same book more than once, while others — the few — may read certain books numerous times. Rereading enhances the pleasure of a good book, the few would argue. Knowing the ending of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird or Great Expectations, doesn't make rereading it any less pleasurable, assuming you like the book.

My wife was in the former group. She would often ask me if she had already read a certain book, as if I could remember what books she had read. Often she would refrain from reading a certain book because she feared she may have read it at some point in the past. I told her that if she couldn't remember reading it, it made no difference whether she read it again. She didn't want to waste her time, however, with a book she may have already read. (And it probably could have been argued that if she had really loved the book, she would have remembered reading it.)

I am not entirely certain which group I belong to. As a book reviewer for most of my life and as someone who yearns to read a vast assortment of books, I mostly read books just once. Yet there are exceptions, and especially since retirement I have tried to return to books I enjoyed in the past.

I've read Moby-Dick twice. I even read Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror twice. Most of Thomas Hardy's major novels I have read at least twice. I don't consider Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt to be his best novel or even my favorite, yet I've read it three times. And J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey I've read read four times. Numerous others I have returned to at least once.

Yet I've heard of other readers who read favorite books a dozen times or more, sometimes even once a year. I envy them. Oh to be able to reread certain books again and again. I guess my heart is with the few, even though in practice I am usually among the many.