This is the first, and hopefully one of the last, re-reads for this year. I don’t often go back and read a book again; the circumstances under which I do so are surprisingly rare. I must either have absolutely loved the book and found it a quick and easy comfort read, or I must have hated the book and then let a few years pass in order to allow myself to change enough that I might gain new insights (this worked for Dubliners, which I initially disliked but now love, but not for Catcher in the Rye, which I hated as much last summer as I did when I first read it ten years ago). Good Omens falls into the former category, as my all-time favourite humour book. This particular re-reading was predicated by my finding a copy of the new hardback version for next to nothing in a used/remaindered bookshop just up the street from my apartment. The spine still crackles.
The last time I read Good Omens was probably 1994 or 1995, and a lot has changed since then, not just in terms of the world around me, but in terms of myself as well. The difference between me at 15 and me at 27 is rather more striking than a later age gap of similar size might be. A lot of the good bits that I found astonishingly funny the first time around didn’t seem quite so clever (why every modern English humour writer has to include an “Elvis is alive!” joke is beyond me; they weren’t funny when they began to crop up, and they continue to not be funny to this very day), but there was a good deal of stuff, sexual innuendo in particular, that I didn’t catch the first time that I was able to enjoy this time around. There won’t be any in-depth analysis today, though. I really don’t want to dissect this book; I’m worried that if I pick apart the little things (like the fact that Aziraphael is monumentally stupid, until they suddenly tell you he isn’t and he turns out to be quite good at math and other things, and then when that scene is over he goes back to being stupid) then it won’t be a comfort re-read for me anymore, and I’d hate to lose that.
The next book I plan to read is The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud (I had actually initially planned for this to be my fourth book of the year, but other things came up).
