How great is it to find a book you really love, one you want to tear through in one sitting, one you finish by forgoing sleep and staying up until two in the morning?

I did that not too long ago, but the book had been on my shelves for years. I鈥檇 picked up a copy of Michael Ondaatje鈥檚 In the Skin of a Lion on a whim, gotten about three chapters into it, and given up.

Sure, I鈥檇 enjoyed The English Patient, but this one wasn鈥檛 for me. The prose was too artful, I thought. Not the kind of thing I enjoyed, which is often, although not exclusively, books containing spaceships and magic swords and so forth.

But over the years, having read approximately a million spaceships and/or magic swords books, I鈥檝e gotten fussy about my selections from that shelf in the library.

I gravitate more and more towards the writers who can tell me about planetary orbits as well as string together a pretty sentence. (There are more of them about than you might think. Start with Ursula K. LeGuin.)

I鈥檝e ventured out to other genres, devouring the terse, funny crime novels of Elmore Leonard or the grim, slow-burn spy novels of John Le Carr茅, even a few of the classic Regency romances of Georgette Heyer.

I鈥檇 gone back to Ondaatje, too, picking up a copy of Warlight from the local library branch during the pandemic. (Tip: When in doubt as an author, include detailed info on post-war greyhound smuggling.)

So, maybe 15 years after I first shoved In the Skin of a Lion back on the shelf, I dusted it off.

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And I couldn鈥檛 put it down.

I鈥檇 hoped to like the book more, years later. But I was surprised by how different the reading experience was.

I could now bask in the fact that Ondaatje, for all that he values his prose, is not shy about including plenty of wild stuff. This is a literary novel with explosions, a prison break, and a yacht hijacking.

Usually, this glee is not what happens when you revisit an old book.

Books you loved as an adolescent or young adult have often become tarnished while you weren鈥檛 looking at them. You notice things you didn鈥檛 see 10, 20, 30 years ago 鈥� clumsy prose, creepy sexism, plot holes big enough to fall into.

It was satisfying to find that it was possible to move in the opposite direction, to find more in a book than I鈥檇 been able to see since the first time I鈥檇 opened it.

It would be simplistic to say that my tastes have changed over the years, although that is true.

It鈥檚 more true to say that I鈥檓 simply a different person, now. Everyone changes, or we should hope we do.

There鈥檚 this idea that most of our formative experiences happen in high school, in our twenties, and then we鈥檙e done. We鈥檙e fully formed, and change slows to a crawl, or stops altogether. We are who we are, and little short of catastrophe will alter what we鈥檝e become.

Something as simple as an old book can tell you that isn鈥檛 always true. That鈥檚 worth the price of a paperback.