How long does a book stay read?

A strange question I know, but it was prompted by the appearance of another list.  Susan at Pages Turned posted a link to a list of the novels which Jane Smiley read while she was writing her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel and which she felt were books which would 'illuminate the whole concept of the novel'.

Looking down the list, mentally adding up the number I've read, I came to several, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, to name but three, that I know I read as a teenager.  I remember the experience of reading the book, the fact of reading the book, and in the case of A Tale of Two Cities I still have the exact copy of the book I read, but although I remember all that, I don't know that I really retain much of the book itself twenty odd years later.  I know the story lines and names of some of the characters in each of the three I've named because they are themselves well known, and have passed into the wider common culture outside the novel itself.  But I'm reasonably confident that if I went back and re-read them I would find the books themselves almost unrecognisable. 

My rule of thumb test for whether I can honestly claim to have read a book is (1) obviously at some point I have read the book all the way from the beginning to the end; (2) if asked whether I would recommend it, I could give a half way sensible answer involving plot, characters and themes; (3) I remember enough about it to know if I would ever want to re-read it.  Applying that rule to my three examples, gives me a 2 out of 3 success rate.  (I really do not recall anything very much about The Great Gatsby except bemusement that anyone thought it was worth reading.) 

Comments

[Susan]

I don't remember getting anything out of The Great Gatsby when I read it as a teenager (although like you, I know exactly when and where I read it), but I was much impressed when I returned to it years later.

Sometimes I feel I ought to reread Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, which I hated and can't remember one thing about, but then I remember all the other books I still haven't read the first time, and the feeling passes.

[Edward Pettit]

I've always found this to be a particularly distressing problem, that all the books I read I will forget piece by piece. Of course, it's not distressing that I get to read the good ones over again and (bonus) get to forget the bad ones. But there is so little time as it is, and so many books to read, now further exacerbated by having to read the good ones more than once, that I'll never finish my lists. I fear I'll die with a houseful of unread books.

Ah, well, better press on.
Sigh,
Ed

[Stefanie]

It is distressing to know that even the books you most loved you will forget some of the best parts. And finding the time to re-read is so hard, but when I manage it, it feels like visiting with an old friend. Usually if I have read a book twice and have really studied it I retain more memory of it. For some strange reason I have read The Great Gatsby three times, hating it more each time. I am determined that I will never read it again.

[Victoria]

My book-memory threshold is so ridiculously short...I find myself bereft of details and more complex thematics a few months after a first reading and nearly all coherent thoughts lost after a year, leaving me with vague memories and assumptions. :-( I'm in awe of people who can draw up details from their reading pasts and make wonderfully informed comparisons and criticisms...surely, I think, this is what reading is for. But then, I'm not sure. The thrill of re-reading, of rediscovery can, sometimes, be better than the first instance...I re-read Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" last year and felt my understanding infinitely enriched by what I'd absorbed in the interim. The gift is in the forgetting perhaps?

[Ella]

Billy Collins has a wonderful poem about forgetting novels. It says: first the title goes, then the names of the characters, then the endings.
I think he's right. I can't believe all the things I've forgotten; I look at my archives every once in a while and think "Good lord, I've read McFee? Really?"

[Sandra]

I think half-forgetting is actually the worst. I'm always trying to find passages in books that I *definitely* remember, only to find them turn up in the work of someone completely different. Or even more embarrassingly: to transpose the characters from one work to another. For years I was convinced that Mrs Malaprop was a Dickens character. Though now I come to think about it, I'm sure he did have a character who Malapropped for comic effect. Can I remember which novel? No chance!