Reading, like Wine, Can be Better After Aging

2019's Little Women was the most recent film adaptation

Sure, you've "read" a book, but how much of it did you retain, and how much of it did you understand?

I read Little Women as a schoolboy. Enjoying the tale of Jo March and her sisters, I picked up its sequel, Little Men, which sat on the Louisa May Alcott shelf in the Winne Units library. The latter book about the following generation wasn't as compelling, but I digress.

As a junior staffer I had a boss who bent the rules without much self-reflection. His favorite aphorism was "it's easier to be forgiven than to ask permission." He was not successful in his business or personal life and was fired two years later.

Revisiting Little Women in 2020, I came across the passage where the teenaged Jo is earning good money for writing "sensational" fiction but doesn't want to tell her parents:

She had a feeling that Father and Mother would not approve, and preferred to have her own way first, and beg pardon afterward.

Four decades after hearing my ex-boss's wisdom, I made the connection to a sentence from a 19th-century children's book.

If good writing is re-writing, then appreciative reading is re-reading, sometimes 60 years later.

Related, from The Therapeutic Value of Reading:

When times are uncertain and scary, something familiar can be a source of solace. The survey of pandemic reading habits conducted by the researchers at Aston University found two types of readers: Those who focused on reading something new to them, to expand their knowledge, and those who re-read familiar books for the sense of comfort and stability and the lack of surprises.

The writer was being too dismissive: re-reading can expand knowledge, too.