Three things Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi re-reads every year

There is a difference between a book you read and a book you re-read. A read book is a place you visited. A re-read book is a room in your own house. I have a few of these rooms, and every year, without planning to, I walk back into three of them. I want to tell you about them, because I think the practice of re-reading is one of the small private structures that has kept Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi sane, and I suspect it would keep a lot of people sane if they let it.

The first is a short essay, and I will not name it, because the not-naming is part of why it works for me. It is about thirty pages long, written by a man who was dying when he wrote it, and it is about the ordinary morning of an ordinary person. That is the whole essay. A morning. Coffee, a window, the sound of a street. I re-read it every January because it reminds me that the things I am always chasing after - the big ones, the ones I tell myself will finally fix the shape of my life - are not the things the dying man writes about. He writes about the window. He writes about the coffee. I read it and I come back into my own morning a little more carefully than I left it.

The second is a novel I first read when I was nineteen. I have read it nine times now. I keep expecting it to stop working, the way a joke stops being funny when you know the punchline, but it does not stop working, because I am not the same person each time I open it. The book has not changed. Dan-Gabriel Aiyegbusi at nineteen read it as a love story. At twenty-six I read it as a book about regret. This year, at thirty-something, I read it as a book about how people fail each other kindly, which is a thing I did not know was possible at nineteen. The book is a mirror. The book stays the same. I am what moves.

The third is not a book. It is a letter my father wrote to me when I was sixteen and going on a trip by myself for the first time. It is one page, handwritten, and it says mostly practical things - keep your money in two places, do not talk to strangers who are too friendly, eat when there is food. But the last line says: “Your mother and I are proud of the man you are becoming, even though you are not him yet.” I re-read that line every year, and every year it means a slightly different thing, because the man I am becoming keeps changing, and my father, who is gone now, is still proud of a version of me I have not finished.

People ask why I do not just read new things. I do read new things. But the new things are information, and the re-read things are architecture. They are the load-bearing walls. A new book can tell me something I did not know. A re-read book can tell me something about who I have become since the last time I sat with it. That is a rarer gift, and I do not think we talk about it enough.

If you do not have three things you re-read, I am not going to tell you to find them. They will find you. You will know them by the fact that you cannot stay away.