You Can't Read the Same Book Twice

I'm on record as being a fan of David Mitchell, and now Mitchell lets Guardian readers know how much he likes Italo Calvino. Or at least how much he liked it when he was a younger lad:

If on a winter's night a traveller has aged better than I have, but it has still aged. As an undergraduate I wolfed the book down in one afternoon, but found it much heavier going this time, especially during the shaggy-doggiest sections between the narratives. Describing our world's unknowability in terms of labyrinths and mirrors no longer cuts the metaphysical mustard, somehow.

He hasn't been turned off Calvino by the rereading, but he's decided "however breathtakingly inventive a book is, it is only breathtakingly inventive once." I don't know that I entirely agree; my recollection is that Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati was just as "breathtakingly inventive" the second time I read it, but that may have had something to do with being impressed by the Illuminati stuff the first time I read it and not actually getting a lot of the literary flourishes on the second pass a few years later.