Books worth reading again

I've written about this before. There ares some books that are wonderful first time through but whose real greatness lies in subsequent readings.

I'm well into Anthony Powell's Dance just now reaching the end of volume three, The Acceptance World. This is not my second but probably my fourth, fifth or sixth time through. I haven't kept track. The last time I read it, I remembered feeling a  slight superiority to Powell. Now, like Twain joked about his father, I'm amazed at how much the old guy has learned in the last decade.

And I have to keep reading because there is stuff I need to follow through. There is, for example, a party at which people play Planchette, an occult parlour game related to the Ouija board. Anyway, the board spells out some sentences that deeply upset young Quiggin, a materialist, in fact Marxist, present. But here is the thing: someone has to have fixed the game but who? I'm leaning towards Jimmy Strippling right now, mostly because it would be highly unexpected of him. But who knows. It may be that the question never gets answered—Powell does that a lot. Then again, maybe it's all spelled out in the text and I've just forgotten. It seems like it might be important right now.

I also keep thinking about Hubert Duggan who, as I've commented before, was fictionalized in very different ways by Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Having recently experimented with trying to let real life characters inspire fictional ones, I was amazed at how hard it is to do. The real life of the character is always standing there as a challenge saying, "but he did cheat on his girlfriend" or "but she didn't change for the better". I always used to think that people who drew characters on real life models were being lazy but it's actually much harder than you would guess.

I'm going to put him aside briefly after I finish this volume, and go read Lawrence Durrell (an author who gets progressively less impressive on subsequent reading, at least to me). I'm doing this for research reasons