To Re-read or Not to Re-read and WHY...THAT Is My Question

A professor friend asked me how many books I thought I had read so far in my life. 

My mouth fell open. 

Seriously? 

Can the average reader say how many books they have read in their lifetime? Where would I start? Do I count the times I read drafts of books I've written? And what about all the books read to me (see previous blog about whether listening is reading☺)? That number must be in the hundreds of thousands. But to be perfectly honest, I...have...no...idea.

My mom kept a "books read" ledger in the last thirty or so years of her life. She had 3 of them filled that I knew of, and I'm blessed to say I have those. But I did not follow her lead, because as an ELA/Reading teacher and then a teacher educator, at times I may have read 20 books A WEEK (picture books, early chapter quick reads, and YA novels). Plus, there was always a read-for-pleasure on my couchside table or an ongoing audio book. Or both. 

Do you know how many books YOU have read? I'd be curious to learn how many of my friends/colleagues can quantify. I should be more like teacher friend Susie Adams and post them on Facebook so I have a history keeper.  

The bigger question that same professor friend went on to ask me: how many books did I think I had RE-READ? 

Whoa...that one is MUCH easier. Now to be fair, I have re-read some picture books and easy readers hundreds of times in my teaching career...to my students and with my students. But I could make a pretty thorough list of them and guestimate how many (picture books from Seuss, Sendak, Carle, Willems, Polcanco, Bunting, and Viorst to novels by Green, Collins, Hinton, Reynolds, Thomas, Acevedo, Shusterman, Lowry, lockhart, Hesse, Stone, Picoult and so many more). Those short chapter books that every teacher either read aloud or pre-read so we would know what our students were reading. And longer books like The Hate You Give, All-American Boys, Allegedly, Dear Martin... so many books my students devoured, and I would sit with them and devour books again while they read to model what good readers do.  

But how many books I have I re-read for pleasure? 

I can measure these on my fingers and maybe need my toes. I may have forgotten a few, but some of the most memorable: 

Truman Capote In Cold Blood

Louisa May Alcott Little Women

Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon

Stephen King The Stand (3 times)

Henry James Turn of the Screw

JD Salinger Catcher in the Rye (mostly because I didn't like it when forced to read it in high school, so I re-read it in college)

e. lockhart We Were Liars (if you have read it, you know why)

There are more, but not many. Once I have ingested a book, I am not very likely to ever read it again. I know how it ends. I recall the nuances I felt. I can't imagine reading something again when there are literally thousands I still want to read. Perhaps that will change when I'm old and retired and have little else to do (but won't I still write? That's what I prefer to do with free time). 

So I'm asking, as Stephen King would note, Dear Reader, how often have you re-read books and what are YOUR most notable re-reads? 

But most burning...what made you want to pick up that book you already know and read it again? 

I'm asking for a friend. 

It Is Never As Easy As "This" or "That"

Have you ever written or done something so divisive you had to walk away from it?

I did. Prompted by a police officer friend, I began this manuscript back in 2006. I put it on hold during graduate school seventeen years ago, but even as I feel the urge to finish it, there is a bitter that: it's a true story. Real people were hurt by this crime. Real lives were fractured by that spotlight. 

Have you ever been torn between this urge and that consequence? How do you weigh a decision when this outcome threatens that peace? 

This story is big. Big enough for Dateline, big enough for multiple Investigation Discovery shows. And after twenty years, it is still clamoring in my head for closure. Maybe it is meant to be finished, not published. I don't write to publish. I don't write because I want to. I write because I have to (thank you, Somerset Maugham). This narrative has taken on a life of its own, but I don't want it to open wounds. How do I tell this story without breaking that trust? 

Have you ever tried to protect something delicate without a blueprint? 

I could finish the draft and change ALL the names -- even the ones that tether the project to our community. Or I could change every name except the two essential primary figures. Or I could write it using only the broader but necessary names, because the story deserves to be told and those people acknowledged. Some say it needs to be told. But would that protect those who need it most? Or would this narrative fracture the community all over again?

Have you ever had a story so difficult, you avoided telling it?

I have. Long before this one. But people have tracked this story for two decades. At least once a month, someone asks where it stands. I have finally completed the short story. Not because I had to but because for me, writing is therapy. It is also obsessive. It is private, and it is communal. But a project like this cuts both ways: it may be therapeutic for the writer but painful for the survivor. 

We all have our quandaries. We all have our demons and stories demanding an outlet. It is easy to armchair quarterback another person's dilemma, but one person's this rarely accounts for someone else's that. 

This is my quandary. This story, this book that needs to be told. 

It's about this community. And it's about that crime. 

But it's about other communities touched deeply, scarred even. 

The college.

The LGBTQ+ community.

The blue family.

Friends of both sides and some on no side at all.

This family without a husband and a father. 

That family's loss of a son and a brother. 

How do we share stories like this without opening wounds that may have finally healed, if only a little? 

And a few may never heal at all.