Jen Doll pens a love letter to the books that filled her childhood summers:
There are a great many excellent summer reads, but to me, some of the most moving books of summer are the ones we read way back when we were kids on summer vacation. These stories may be five or 10 or 20 years old, or more, yet they still manage to take us right back to that childhood sense of summer, and wonder, when the days stretched out long and full of possibility, when the sun didn’t go down until 9 p.m. and we could roam free in our neighborhoods, ruling our small worlds, until then. Anything could happen by day, but by night, I’d be tucked in bed with a good book, which I could read with impunity into the wee hours because there was no school the next day. I’m a big believer in re-reading, particularly books we experienced at some long-ago time in our lives, because the power of those stories is not just in their words. They are transportive, letting us remember, re-live, and compare who we were then with who we are now.
Along the same lines, Judith Hertog recently revisited Ivan Turgenev’s classic novel of social change in Russia, Fathers and Sons, and came away surprised by how her response to the work had changed:
On rereading, I had expected to recognize the scenes and characters that moved me years ago. But I could not even guess which passages I had underlined and annotated as a seventeen-year-old. I vaguely remembered being impressed with Bazarov – it was probably one of his speeches that I recommended to my friends – but as an adult, I found Bazarov childishly pompous and recognized him as an insecure young man who holds on to the reassurance of big ideas to avoid having to make emotional connections. He was, in fact, I now realized, the boyfriend with whom I had just broken up when I was seventeen and whom I continued to love obsessively.
On second reading, I found that my sympathy now lies with the older characters, whom Bazarov ridicules. I felt pity for Bazarov’s parents as they try to understand and please their disdainful son. I identified with Arkady’s tenderhearted father, whom Bazarov dismisses as a sentimental fool. I even found myself siding with Arkady’s conservative uncle, Pavel. When, in one of their many quarrels, Bazarov declares that he questions anything that has not been proven, Pavel replies: “We are old-fashioned people; we imagine that without principles… taken as you say on faith, there’s no taking a step, no breathing…” Now that I’m an adult, I’m inclined to agree with Pavel that there is indeed a limit to the power of rational thought. In the twenty-five years between my readings of Fathers and Sons, the elements that originally did not speak to me seem to have germinated and become a part of myself.
The Dish 