"The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one"
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Gissing turns reading into social life, and not in the cozy, book-club way. He’s making a slyly radical claim about where intimacy can be sourced when real society is unreliable, class-bound, or simply exhausting. For a late-Victorian novelist who spent his career chronicling economic anxiety and cultural pretension, it tracks that “excellent work” isn’t entertainment; it’s companionship with standards. A “new friend” implies surprise and mutual recognition: the book doesn’t just please you, it seems to know you, or at least to meet you at your best.
The second half is where the intent sharpens. Re-reading isn’t redundancy; it’s a reunion. Gissing suggests that meaning in literature isn’t mined once and banked. It changes because you change, the way an old friend’s familiar jokes land differently after a bad year, a new job, a loss. That framing also flatters the “excellent work” with durability: truly good books don’t get used up. They hold enough interior life to sustain repeated encounters without collapsing into mere plot.
There’s subtext, too, about taste as a moral and social filter. “Excellent” is doing work here: not every book earns the status of friend. Gissing implies a kind of chosen kinship, a private canon that can outlast fads and, quietly, outclass the people around you. Reading becomes a way to build a life that feels populated, even when the world doesn’t cooperate.
The second half is where the intent sharpens. Re-reading isn’t redundancy; it’s a reunion. Gissing suggests that meaning in literature isn’t mined once and banked. It changes because you change, the way an old friend’s familiar jokes land differently after a bad year, a new job, a loss. That framing also flatters the “excellent work” with durability: truly good books don’t get used up. They hold enough interior life to sustain repeated encounters without collapsing into mere plot.
There’s subtext, too, about taste as a moral and social filter. “Excellent” is doing work here: not every book earns the status of friend. Gissing implies a kind of chosen kinship, a private canon that can outlast fads and, quietly, outclass the people around you. Reading becomes a way to build a life that feels populated, even when the world doesn’t cooperate.
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| Topic | Book |
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