More ! Again !

All reading is rereading. Consider: It is said that in order to learn a new word, children must hear it repeated on average 72 times. Their first books are splendidly versatile objects, part toy, part teething tool, part picture gallery, part--largely--containers of magical shapes that compel an adult to speak the same sounds over and over, making a rhyme or a story reappear out of (it seems) ether. No one who has spent even a few hours in close company with children can fail to observe the way young expanding minds thirst for repetition in play, in domestic rituals and in reading alike. “More!” comes the command, “Again!”; and the same board book is flipped back to the same gnawed cover so that its skeletal narrative can be told, and heard, anew.

Bound in this tightly whorled bud of a beginning reader is a taste--more than that, a need--for circularity that seems fundamental to the act of reading. One more commonly thinks of reading as a linear experience: From title page to final period, the eye and the hand tug the brain forward. Yet the brain does not always comply. It wanders. It skips ahead. It loops back and makes connections to earlier events in the story. It remembers and makes connections to other stories and books entirely. And once the book is completed, the circularity continues: Sometimes (or in some future time) it consists of actual rereading; often it means mentally sifting through what has been read; occasionally, with beloved books especially, an association forms to the circumstances in which the book first came into the reader’s hands so that moments of reading become joined with moments of experience. This circle of reading, which begins in childhood, is enlarged and enriched all through one’s reading life; it constantly spirals overhead, or in one’s head, like a persistent wind.

If the reader also happens to be a writer, he may be moved to throw a net up into that circulating wind and report on what has been captured in it. In the most general terms, this is the shared impulse behind “Letters to My Son on the Love of Books” by Roberto Cotroneo, “The Books in My Life” by Colin Wilson and “A Dangerous Profession” by Frederick Busch, three authors of different origin (Italy, England and America, respectively), background and talent who, passionate lifelong readers all, come together in the common belief that, as Cotroneo observes, literature “isn’t simply a game of the intellect, but a way of understanding the world.”

Cotroneo’s charming “Letters to My Son on the Love of Books” is the incarnation of pedagogic tenderness, perhaps because his intended audience is his young son, Francesco. In advising Francesco how to read, Cotroneo is in essence teaching him how to think critically and independently: By his example, he is showing his son how to frame his opinions with nuance, a moderation of personality and some respect for, and faith in, their intended audience.

Cotroneo, who is a literary critic, fiction writer and the cultural editor of the Italian news magazine L’Espresso, bestows upon his son the product of years spent in his own reading circle. He also, inevitably, presents pieces of his autobiography, using books to introduce the young Francesco to the young Roberto. The book addresses an unpredictable collection of reading material; each letter pairs a text with (though ranges well beyond) a named theme: “Treasure Island” (anxiety), “The Catcher in the Rye” (tenderness), “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land” (passion) and Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser,” a novel based on the life of Glenn Gould (talent).

Cotroneo’s lifetime-to-date of careful reading has caused him to accrue wisdom that is at once literary and existential. Always put your faith in a person who reads, he counsels his son. Only stupid people run out of subject matter. Do not trust people who have no desire to learn about the past. Books should be treated well, but they are never sacred. Admiration should be the end, not the beginning, of the reading experience. Great books impart the feeling that everything is comprehensible, until you realize that it actually isn’t. All books are “interpretative machines endowed with a conscience, which is yours, the reader,” yet “the important thing is that the interpretation is sustainable and not arbitrary.”

Given the solitude and the interiority of the reading experience, the sustainable interpretation is not always elegantly achieved. There is, after all, a withdrawn, even a curiously solipsistic quality to the process of reading, which masquerades as a meeting of two minds but which is in fact one active and malleable mind brushing up against a mind already fixed in its language, images and ideas. The reader can question and challenge the writer, but the writer cannot, in the same way, question and challenge the reader back. This phenomenon, which is another aspect of the circularity of reading, sometimes causes the commentator to slip into moments of grandiosity and self-admiration, two qualities that--balanced to some degree by enthusiasm and exuberance--characterize Wilson’s “The Books in My Life.”

Wilson, a polymath author of several dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, has a personal library of more than 20,000 volumes. He recalls where and when he bought (or occasionally stole) his books, what he paid for them, what color boards they are bound in and what he felt and thought when he first read them. He juxtaposes all this against who he is today and what he feels and thinks about some of these books on rereading or remembering them in late middle age. Wilson’s private reading circle is vigorously and vividly populated. Reading, for him, is a “mild form of insanity” that helped free him from his uncultivated working-class childhood. Beginning in his youth, books have continued all his life to feed his “natural instinct to plunge into the immense inner space of the human mind.”

All this shows bravura, zest, appetite. Yet Wilson, who titled his adolescent diary “Escape From Personality,” is never quite able to get out of the way of his. He views himself as a Shavian superman--or at any rate as someone whose spiritual struggles have caused him to seek to arouse the “sleeping superman inside” and live by a constant assertion of intellect, will and energy. “I have merely to recall clearly some past crisis,” Wilson insists, “to ‘wake myself up’ ” from passivity or “robotic consciousness.”

This tone of self-help may explain why Wilson’s book is classified on its back cover as “metaphysical.” Yet it is not so much the ideas that are off-putting (although some of them are) as the simplicity and the almost belligerent didacticism with which they are expressed. A related problem afflicts Wilson when he writes more directly about reading. Though one cannot fail to admire his omnivorous digestion of literature, and though one might smile at (while frequently disagreeing with) the pluckiness of some of his pronouncements, these essays generally feel as though they were written by a hectoring high school English teacher, and the reader often bristles at the bluster and Wilson’s condescension to his subjects.

Thus James Joyce, although he taught Wilson to write through close observation, is excessively autobiographical and after “A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” “had virtually run out of anything further to say.” Wilson ceased reading Henry James because his “sheltered life prevented him from maturing emotionally or intellectually and, like all old bachelors, he grew increasingly fussy and finicky.” Of Dostoevsky, Wilson declares, “I can no longer put up with the masochism, self-pity, and hysteria” and that Samuel Beckett and his “fellow pessimists . . . poison our cultural heritage.”

Wilson’s heroes, by contrast, are (not surprisingly) a mixture of writers who create supermen--George Bernard Shaw; Nietzsche; Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes, though a “flawed” superman, manages to avoid the “cul-de-sac of despair and defeat that destroyed so many of the best minds of the fin de siecle period”--and writers of boys’ or adventure stories: David Lindsay, Jeffrey Farnol and Mark Twain, whose “Tom Sawyer” was “the best book I ever read,” though “The Adventures of Huck Finn” caused him to “give up in disgust.”

Although novelist Busch has subtitled “A Dangerous Profession” “A Book About the Writing Life,” it is effectively a book about reading even when the reading taking place is of people and not actual texts. “My Father’s War,” one of the more moving and personal pieces in this collection of essays, is a portrait of the author’s father, Benjamin J. Busch, whom his son approaches through the one written document his father created, a frustratingly inexpressive diary he kept during World War II. Seasoned reader that he is and (one feels) equally seasoned son, Busch is acutely attentive to his father’s omissions. Like a painter making expert use of negative space, the senior Busch for a long time doesn’t mention death or fear in his diary--which are “all I can imagine myself imagining,” his son comments--and when he is wounded by a booby trap, he conveys the event in an unadorned 13 words. Only on furlough at home does the soldier refer to “the end of the dread of death.” “He was several people. He was secret from himself,” Busch explains; and later: “I think that he is an aspect of every charming, elusive, sturdy, and vanishing man I have written.” All this is lovely in a self-referential and piercing sort of way, but Busch presses on, turning the personal into a wider commentary on the nature of writing: “You would think I’d have gotten him right by now, achieved some kind of satisfying resolution. But . . . there is no satisfaction, because writing does not offer that emotion.”

Busch further “reads” his past by presenting a sketch of his friend Terrence des Pres, which, for all its elegiac affection for the dead writer and genuine appreciation of Des Pres’ intellect, is a much cagier piece of work. A circumlocution like “After the 1979 publication of my novel ‘Rounds,’ in which Terrence claimed to find himself represented as less than heroic, we stopped knowing each other” interestingly omits (as does Benjamin Busch’s war diary) Busch’s participation in the action at hand, which in this case appears to be the writing of a novel that imperiled their friendship. “The Floating Christmas Tree” is Busch’s rendition of a classic writer’s fairy tale: his down-and-out and oft-rejected period, in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, when he worked at a market research firm during the day and at night wrote in the bathroom of his studio apartment. The story is a fairy tale because the very fact that the reader is able to cup it in his palms tells him that the writer thrives (or at least survives) in the end, but it is one of those essential stories that speaks to all people embarked on creative journeys; when well done, as here, it is a story that can’t be told too often.

As a reader of writers (Herman Melville, Graham Greene, John O’Hara), Busch can be astute and big-hearted. He writes incisively about how Charles Dickens, in “David Copperfield,” “does what all novelists do: He resists time by rowing backward, against the current, into his own life.” The current, in Dickens’ case, was mighty and guilt-inducing, because one of the issues at stake was Copperfield’s marriage to Dora, whose “unsuitability of mind and purpose” mirrored Dickens’ to Kate Hogarth. The reader responds even more warmly to Busch’s generosity toward overlooked or unfairly interpreted writers. In “Even the Smallest Position,” Busch at length describes why he so deeply values “The Steinway Quintet,” a long short story by Leslie Epstein, a friend of his. No matter. Busch’s painstaking panegyric to the story’s “music and the song of language, in the air or on the page” is sufficiently well-substantiated to add the scarce title to any questing reader’s wish list, which is one of the delightful byproducts of these kinds of essays: their capacity to open up one’s own personal reading circle.

A different--a corrective--value emerges in Busch’s piece on Ernest Hemingway, a writer whose readership, he feels, has been unfairly reduced by the modern cult of biography. Though Busch does not dismiss the more problematic habits of Hemingway’s mind (the bigotry, the anti-Semitism, the misogyny, the violence), he maintains that filing writers away “in categories that trundle home like mortuary drawers” is a lazy and superficial substitute for coming to terms with their writing, which in Hemingway’s case can work “awfully effectively on the soul of an attentive reader who is not rigidly, ideologically, insensible to it.”

Near the end of his probing, gently meditative volume, Cotroneo explains to his son why “I and so many others write books like this one, instead of occupying ourselves with the concrete, the serious and the real.” He might easily be speaking for Busch and Wilson, for inhabitants of reading circles everywhere, when he proceeds to tell Francesco that “books contain instructions about how to live life by means of a fictitious world, a world made of paper.” Such instructions are not always seen or grasped with ease or finality, which may be why the pursuit of them keeps these readers--all committed readers--reading and rereading, always.