The books I keep restarting

There is a particular shelf in my head reserved for books I have begun with total sincerity and abandoned around page sixty. Not bad books. Not even hard books, most of them. Just books that require a version of me with more evenings.

I used to feel guilty about this. Now I think the restart is doing something. Each attempt leaves a residue — a phrase, an argument, the shape of a chapter — and by the fourth attempt I know the book well enough to have opinions about it without ever having read the end.

The standing four

• One I restart every January, on the theory that this is the year I become a person who reads before bed rather than a person who reads three sentences before bed.
• One I restart whenever I move house, because it turns up in a box and I take that as instruction.
• One I restart because someone smart mentioned it, which is the worst reason and the most reliable one.
• One I have genuinely forgotten I own, and rediscover with real delight roughly every eighteen months.

What the restarting is for

There’s a line I keep coming back to, about how rereading isn’t repetition:

You never step in the same book twice. The book holds still; you are the part that moved.

I don’t fully believe it. It’s a bit tidy. But it does describe what happens when a paragraph that meant nothing in 2021 stops you cold now — the paragraph didn’t change, and something has to account for the difference.

This is, I accept, a rationalisation. I am still going to finish one of them this year. The bookshelf will say which.