Leftie carrying reading matter is excited again (9)
I believe the answer is:
rekindled
'excited again' is the definition.
The definition and answer can be both to do with human feelings as well as being past participle verbs.
Maybe you can see an association between them that I don't see?
'leftie carrying reading matter' is the wordplay.
'leftie' becomes 'red' (red can informally mean a political leftwinger).
'carrying' indicates putting letters inside.
'reading matter' becomes 'kindle' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'red' going around 'kindle' is 'REKINDLED'.
'is' acts as a link.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for rekindled that I've seen before include "Aroused (of former interests)" , "Revived" , "Fired over" , "Invigorated" .)