The Review I Went Back and Changed My Mind About

I don’t reread books often, there’s always something new stacked up waiting, but His Master’s Voice is the one I’ve gone back to twice now, and my opinion of it moved a real amount between the first read and the second. The first time through I was mostly frustrated, long stretches of the narrator circling the same doubts, a story that seemed more interested in thinking out loud than actually moving, and I rated it accordingly, lower than I’d rate it today.

The second read happened almost by accident. I was in the middle of that four month boundary dispute I’ve written about here before, worn out most evenings, not in the mood for anything that demanded a lot of forward momentum, and I picked this back up mostly because it was already on my shelf and I didn’t have it in me to start something new. And something about reading it slow, a chapter at a time over a couple weeks instead of pushing through it fast the way I read most things, changed what the book actually was to me.

The parts that annoyed me the first time, the narrator’s circling, the philosophical tangents that don’t resolve into anything tidy, read completely differently at a slower pace. They stopped feeling like the book stalling and started feeling like the actual argument, that a message from something truly alien might never announce itself as a message at all, might just look like more circling, more unresolved noise, until you’ve sat with it long enough to notice the shape underneath. I don’t think I was wrong the first time exactly. I think I was reading it at the wrong speed for what it was trying to do.

I went back and touched up my rating after that second pass, and I don’t do that often, changing a number after the fact feels a little like admitting the first version of me didn’t know what he was talking about, which is uncomfortable in a small way every time. But the alternative is pretending the first read was the whole truth of the book, and it wasn’t. Some books apparently need you to be tired and slow to actually meet them where they are, and I got lucky that a rough few months happened to line up with a second chance at this one.