Are You Surprised by the Books that Stay with You?

I recently did that Facebook book nerd meme that is making the rounds, the one where you’re supposed to list ten books that have stayed with you. The question, as I copied it, instructed me to not think too hard about this question, so of course I then proceeded to think twice as long as most other people would have done thinking long and hard on the matter.

Because the thing about that question is, my answers surprised me. I thought, I made notes, I consulted my Goodreads ratings. And the weird thing that I discovered was that some of the books I remember loving I’ve largely forgot, and other books that left me unsatisfied with their endings or maybe some teensy weensy detail that felt off for me…Well, some of those books have stayed with me much more strongly. Their worlds or characters or lingering questions still jangle in my head while other much-loved books have been cast aside, mentally as well as physically. How on earth could I have given Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer only four stars? That book burns bright in my mind as warmly as the sensual summertime it describes.

Does this happen to you? Do you find yourself looking at your Goodreads ratings, or maybe at your bookshelf, and thinking that the novel you found excellent was maybe just pretty good, but that once-okay book is now rather excellent from this distance?

Maybe we should have two sets of book ratings: one right after we’ve read a book, and another two years later—or maybe down the road when we’ve experienced that loss the book describes, or we can appreciate its obscene weirdness.

Isn’t this the wonder of reading? It always surprises me the varied and personal reactions people have to stories, both my own and others’. So much work goes into the creation of a story, and I’m not talking about the writing. It’s impossible for a book to capture every last detail, so the reader must add in visual flourishes, motivations, the unexplained tone of character voices. I suspect this is why some people claim to be too tired to read at times. You add so much of yourself to what you read, and it can wear you out; but it’s really quite wonderful, to build a home out of and within a book like that. For better or worse, each time you read a story it’s personal: you come to it with particular moods, expectations, experiences.

And as we all know, these things change over time—by the hour or week, even.

This is all to say that maybe a book’s influence doesn’t just vary between two people, but also between the same person at two different times in her life.