writing in the dust

Jacobs has reshaped not only how I think about reading but how and what I actually read. For me, the most riveting section of his book was his discussion of a problem that has plagued me for years. You love an author. The author is dead, or has at any rate completed the series she wrote that you love. (In my case: Flannery O’Connor falls into the first category, Dorothy Sayers into both.) What do you, the besotted reader, do? Well, you can keep rereading the author’s published oeuvre—but there is, Jacobs acknowledges, a certain diminishing return to doing so. At the very least, you have to let longer and longer periods elapse between rereadings. You can turn to spinoffs—the Jane Austen fan has no shortage of novels that purport to reveal what happened after Darcy and Elizabeth married, novels that take us into the lives of 20th-century book clubs reading Austen, novels that place the story line of Austen novels in today’s London. But how gratifying are these spinoffs, really? *The Diary of Bridget Jones* may have its satisfactions, but they are not the satisfactions of reading an actual Jane Austen novel for the first time.

Jacobs offers a solution to this problem that is both simple and exciting: when you’ve finished reading, and rereading, everything that Jane Austen wrote, read what she read. “[R]ead the Gothic romances and epistolary novels of the previous century, along with … the philosophy of John Locke and David Hume. One of Hume’s philosophical emphases is the power of what he calls ‘impressions.’ And once you know what Hume means by that word it becomes really interesting to note that the original title of *Pride and Prejudice* was *First Impressions*.”

I think that suggestion may be the most thrilling thing I have ever read. It not only intervened to arrest my endless—and yes, to some extent, diminishingly enjoyable—rereadings of favorite authors. It has opened before me a huge and fascinating topography to explore. Upon reading Jacobs, I immediately ordered (from Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas, a bookstore you should check out in person or online, if you haven’t) a published bibliography of O’Connor’s library, as well as her collected book reviews, and those two books have guided my reading for the last few months, taking me more deeply into O’Connor than a sixth reading of *The Habit of Being* could have done, and introducing me to works that in their own right are interesting—I am currently reading Caroline Gordon’s *The Malefactors*, which O’Connor said was the best treatment of conversion in American fiction.