Witches, lions and the Torah

ISPENT MY entire childhood re-reading books. I’m not sure at what point I ever read a book for the first time, because my principal memory is of re-reading them again and again and again. Now, as an adult, I rarely reread anything. There’s so little time and so many new books to explore. And yet it’s a shame because, with a really great book, the experience of reading it gets richer and more pleasurable every single time. There’s the luxury of revisiting the passages you love, combined with the discovery of details and nuances you’d missed the first, or second, or third time.

Now that I have my own kids, I get to enjoy an entirely different type of re-reading by sharing my favourite children’s books with them. I recently felt a delicious shiver of anticipation as I opened The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and read to my six-year-old the words, “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.” How wonderful to be able to see that story through the eyes of someone who has absolutely no idea what is going to happen after Lucy steps into the wardrobe.

And then there’s Harry Potter. My husband and I were so desperate be the one to introduce our kids to the Harry Potter series that we agreed to do so in strict rotation. I read the first book to our oldest the moment he turned seven (the optimum age, we decided, to appreciate it for the first time).

When it was the middle child’s turn, I tried to use my, “I’m a children’s book editor” credentials to persuade Anthony to let me read it to her as well, but he was unmoved by my argument — so they read it together.

Child number three will turn seven in exactly a month and I plan to waste no time in recounting to him that, “Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.”

What I cannot give him, however, is a replica of my own experience in first reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, shortly after it was published in 1997. The book was so new that I had no idea Harry Potter was a wizard. So when Harry found that out for himself, I went on that journey with him. Of course, practically everyone in the world now knows that Harry is a wizard, whether or not they’ve read the books — so that particular surprise is lost forever.

I do very occasionally let myself re-read a book for adults, as a sortof special treat. Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman, for example, which is a collection of essays about reading (rather meta, now I think about it). And Watching the English by Kate Fox — a wonderfully incisive and entertaining examination of our culture by an anthropologist.

My friend, Cantor Zöe Jacobs happened to pass by as I was writing the above.

“What’s your column about,” she asked.

I explained that it was about rereading books.

“Ooh — I’ll tell you what I keep rereading,” she said.

“What?” I asked, perking up at the possibility of adding a quote from a member of the clergy.

“The Torah,” she replied, and walked away chuckling at her statement of the bleedin’ obvious.

I narrowed my eyes and thanked her for her “helpfulness”. But then her comment got me thinking. I tend to view the Torah as a more of an entity, a phenomenon, than merely a book. But it is a book — or five books at any rate— and it has been continually re-read, retold and re-enacted for centuries. Religious people study and analyse every word in an open-ended quest to hear and understand the word of God.

It’s actually a work that touches us all, whatever the nature or level of our beliefs. Lovers of stories get caught up in its drama and intrigue; historians use it as an unparallelled source document to learn about the ancient world; secular scholars analyse it endlessly, trying to prove their theories about its authorship. If I had been a commissioning editor back in biblical times and the Torah had been submitted to me for publication, I hope I’d have had the good judgment to offer a very substantial advance indeed. Its reprint record has been pretty extraordinary.

Of course, if one subscribes to the belief that the Torah was told by God to Moses, the advance and royalty arrangement becomes more complicated. There may be a disagreement about which of them owns the intellectual property. It does seem, at any rate, that if you want your work to be constantly re-read, you either need to write a children’s book or a seminal religious text. There unfortunately isn’t very much gap in the market for either.

The more mathematical among you will have noticed that Anthony and I have not come out equally in the “reading Harry Potter” stakes. By the time we’re done, he will have read it to one of our three children and me to two of them. It’s arguable that we should have a fourth child in order to remedy the imbalance. Perhaps I’ll suggest it to him — I’m sure he’ll think it’s a top idea.

To be read again and again, write for children