I
F I conducted a brutal assessment of my reading
habits—something I am not eager to do—the results
would show that I spend an alarming percentage of
my time rereading the same book: the 1965 novel
Stoner by John Williams.
As a reader and part-time book critic, I know I should
focus my limited attention on the relentless tide of new
and exciting work. But the decision to reread Stoner often
feels more like a compulsion.
I’m not alone in this pattern. My wife, the novelist Erin
Almond, has probably read Little Women as many times as
I’ve read Stoner. A friend, the novelist and critic William
Giraldi, revisits Wilkie Collins’s novels The Moonstone and
The Woman in White on an annual basis.
I suspect every writer could tell a similar story. We re-
turn to our favorite novels for three distinct reasons.
First, for the sheer pleasure of entering into a familiar
world, as we did in childhood, when we would delightedly
read—or be read—the same story every night.
Second, because particular books serve as our literary
mentors, directly influencing our own efforts, as in the
case of Zadie Smith, whose 2005 novel, On Beauty, is, by
her own enthusiastic declaration, a modern homage to the
E. M. Forster classic Howards End.
Finally, and most profoundly, our favorite novels be-
come manuals for living. We read them to be enchanted
and inspired, to be transported out of ourselves but, most
centrally, to know ourselves more deeply.I
FOUND the novel Stoner back in 1995, during the first
months of my MFA program, though it would prob-
ably be more accurate to say that Stoner found me.
A second-year student pressed it into my hands at
the tail end of a drunken party. I dutifully returned to my
apartment and devoured it in a single night, which was not
something I had ever done before.
What captured me on that first read was the novel’s
earnest faith in the redemptive power of literature. The
book’s hero, William Stoner, heads off to college hop-
ing to discover new agricultural methods and rescue his
parents’ farm.STEVE ALMOND is the
author of eleven books of
fiction and nonfiction, most
recently William Stoner and
the Battle for the Inner Life
(Ig Publishing, 2019).WHAT OUR FAVORITE NOVELS TEACH US
ABOUT OURSELVESManuals for Living
Life
THE LITERARY25 POETS & WRITERS^jen
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