✦ Refrakt: 04 — Retracing Your Steps

I almost never re-read. For a while, I read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises each year, probably the book I’ve read most, but that habit has fallen by the wayside. Even as I’m working through my backlog now, I think about the mountain of books I want to read: they haunt me from my bookcases, from my e-reader library, from my wishlists. How can I afford to go back, when I know I’m already not going to have enough time to read everything I want to in this life? I can feel my mortality creeping in.

And yet, I recently decided to embark on a complete Murakami Haruki re-read. I’ll happily tell people he’s one of my favorite writers, quirks and all (I think we’re about due for public opinion to swing around on Murakami again in the positive; but that’s for another time). He’s one of the authors for whom I’ve read most of his books, and what I haven’t yet read I’ve savored out, anxiously delaying the inevitable moment I’ll have nothing of his left to read.