I want to talk about the specific experience of finishing a novel and immediately starting to reread it. This has happened to me twice — once with The Remains of the Day and once with Gilead — and both times the reread produced a completely different emotional experience from the first reading.

The first reading of The Remains of the Day produces a slow accumulation of unease. The reread produces something closer to grief, because you know what's coming and you see it in every page. Every moment when Stevens doesn't say what he feels, you know now what he's sacrificing. The reread is devastating in a way the first reading wasn't.

This is a different experience from the common rereading experience of finding the book less than you remembered. These were books that became more than they initially were. The second reading revealed what the first reading had been building toward.