Phenomenologists of reading

For many years a thought has routinely come to mind:

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

I had forgotten who said it or where I read it, but looking it up now it comes from CS Lewis.¹

I thought of this often when encountering comments made by readers of important books, where the reader either completely misunderstood the text or seemed to lack the requisite background and contextual knowledge to accurately interpet it.

Bachelard

I recently encountered an even more severe version of this axiom. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes the first reading of a book as a "too passive" affair.

But every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading...give us, little by little, the solution of this problem. Imperceptabily, we give ourselves the illusion that both the problem and the solution are ours. The psychological nuance: "I should have written that," establishes us as phenomenologists of reading.²

Criteria for what counts as a "good book" may vary from person to person. But I can't imagine a genuinely good book with respect to which it wouldn't be worth establishing oneself as a "phenomenologist of reading".

How many books can you think of that you have re-read, or would consider re-reading?

I can't think of one I've read multiple times, where I didn't gain a great deal from the effort.

And yet we have forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult. As Goethe said: "Ordinary people don't know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I've spent eighty years at it, and I still can't say that I've reached my goal."