Re-reading a book you read when you were younger - what's your experience?

Aldous Huxley was the first 'serious' writer I got into. He dazzled me in my late teens/early twenties. I thought he was the very definition of urbane, sophisticated brilliance. Recently, I re-read his great novels (Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza etc) and had a slightly different experience. I still think he's a wonderful writer, but he seems more limited – a bit too cold and detached, unable to get inside ordinary people and bring them vividly to life, etc. He's no Dickens, put it that way. I understood a lot more of what he said (much of it went over my head when I first read him).

I have a slightly lower opinion of Wuthering Heights today, but an even higher one of Pride and Prejudice. Thomas Hardy' prose grates on me now. I still think he's an extraordinary storyteller, but a clunky stylist. As I get older, my opinion of Dickens is more mixed. For vivid characters and brilliant, one off scenes, he's unbeatable. The older I get, however, the more I prefer George Eliot. Virginia Woolf said that Middlemarch was one of the few novels written for grown-ups, and I kind of see what she means.

Re-reading Evelyn Waugh, I find him every bit as funny and brilliant, but the nastiness and sadism disturbs me more than it used to. I also feel more sensitive to Wilde's arrogance and snobbery. My love for P. G. Wodehouse, however, deepens with every re-read.

I recently reread The House On The Brink by John Gordon which had so thrilled me as a young reader but as an adult it was hard to push past all the misogyny. I felt more forgiving toward Moonfleet when rereading that.

Like pp Middlemarch is my favourite book to come back to and take something different from at each stage of life.

I always identified with Dorothea because I was studious (even if I thought she was an idiot for marrying Casaubon) but now I'm in my mid-30s I feel really bad for Rosamund and how much was her parents' responsibility and they set her up for failure.

I loved the Secret History SO much when I first read it, and I still love it but now see the characters as pretentious. As a teenager I thought they were all so glamorous.

The book that absolutely traumatised me as a parent that had just been 'ok' as a teen was Pet Semetary. Extremely disturbing once you've had a child. I read it years ago and still think about it every couple of months.

I love to think about what I'll read differently in the future ☺️

OMG I cannot wait for the TV adaptation of this

I love this thread, great question.

I have just found a copy of Waterland in a charity shop, it was a massive deal in the late 1980s. I haven't started reading it yet, but just looking at the odd paragraph is a strange multi-layered experience, it really takes me back very vividly to my sixth form days.

Middlemarch, I didn't quite realise how awful Casaubon was as a teenager.

And re-reading The Handmaids Tale, which I did for A level, as a mother. God that is a painful book.

Completely agree with pp who said the Tenant of Wildfell Hall is ahead of its time. It's an astonishing read, unbelievably progressive and very vivid sense of place. Also loving the discussion of Rebecca.

No intellectual, but for a bit of light reading I decided to reread Jilly Coopers Riders and I am enjoying it and can almost remember it word for word, I last read it about 35 years ago!

I was enthralled by Kim, by Rudyard Kipling at some point in my childhood, I remember that clearly. When I went back to it, several decades later, not only did I recall nothing of what I was reading, I couldn’t get into it and gave up after a few chapters. Perhaps I should try again, listening this time might be better

I felt the same about Their Eyes Were Watching God - younger me accepted him partying without her. Older me was shocked at how much my perspective had shifted - I did NOT accept his apology upon his return! I still love that book, though!

That’s plausible! Re-reading it as a mother of small children was very different to reading it as a child and I was fighting tears sometimes! The poor wife - who might just want access to medical care for her babies or some kind of company.

It’s the only book I genuinely don’t think should be available to teenagers. It’s really nasty.

Yes - same. My daughter complained that it was all building and cooking! I still occasionally re-read ‘Those Happy Golden Years’ though. I tried re-reading John Fowles’s ‘The Magus’ - which I was spellbound by at 18 and found it utterly unreadable.

I've started to re-read books in the last few years. Partly because I've read all of Dicken's novels over the course of several decades and wanted to read the ones I read in my youth again, and to re-read various. books I did as part of my degree and liked. I've re-read Hard Times (the first Dickens I read) and Great Expectations (my favourite Dickens) and enjoyed both. I think it's going to be Bleak House next. Also re-read Eliot's Middlemarch, which I really liked at uni.

This year I re-read the book I always told everyone was my favourite, 'The Master & Margarita' by Bulgakov and that confirmed why I love it. I don't think I appreciated quite how unique and moving it was in my teens, as well as funny and magnificently weird.

Also want to re-read The Great Gatsby and Slaughterhouse 5 in the next year or so.

Enid Blyton the Magic Faraway Tree books were my favourite childhood read. I read them again 50 years later and loved them and the memories they brought back, happy days.

Perhaps I should read Wuthering Heights again. I read it when I was young and hated Cathy & Heathcliff, thought it was a shame to spoil two houses. Not sure I would change my mind though.

WH is just hysterical rambling for the most part. Heathcliffe was treated appallingly as a child, though, being brought into the family as a 'pet' no wonder he turned out as he did.

Lowering the tone somewhat here, but Jilly Coopers Octavia. The only JC book Ive ever read but I found it so glamorous as a young teen. I read it and re-read it. Went back to it a couple of years ago - what a pile of misogynistic crap!

@Needmorelego Yes, I think the theory started with Rose’s diagnosis and worked backwards to look at Charles’ behaviour to see if it fitted a pattern as well. I don’t think Laura had depression but not sure about any of her sisters.

@SydneyCarton that's a really interesting theory about Charles Ingalls. It's generally believed that Laura's daughter Rose was Bipolar and it's hereditary isn't it?

I read The Bridges of Madison County as a teenager and thought it was a nice enough love story.
I read it again a few years ago and was really moved by the intensity and pain of the love. I guess I hadn't been in love when I first read it.

I tried to re-read a Danielle Steel book as an adult (I devoured them as a young teenager) and honestly....what a load of bilge!

The Adrian Mole diaries are nice to read as an adult, not for the literary trip, but more for the nostalgia of what I was doing when it first came out (we are about the same age). It doesn't age well; I thought my teenage son would enjoy it, but I think it was very much of its time.

@SydneyCarton I think it was all down to Ma in Little House that the family ended up staying in the tiny little town of De Smet. The town has never had much more of a population of 1000 or so and nothing grows there - but Ma was like "No more moving".

@Pottingup It would never have occurred to the selfish bastard that his poor company-starved wife might be desperate for some neighbours to escape to socialise with.

I’m sure I read a theory online years ago that Charles Ingalls had bipolar disorder, which explained the erratic nature of the family’s travels as they always seemed to be going to places where nobody else did or at random times, like when they cross the Missouri River and the ice nearly cracks under them). The theory was that the manic phases of the illness drove the bonkers decisions he made.

I don't think we're told definitively, but from her description at the start it's very hard to see how they could have had children when they were living abroad. I suppose given the upper class propensity to send them to boarding school it's not impossible but it doesn't seem at all likely. I happen to have my copy right here as I haven't put it back on the shelf yet, so here goes. This is what she says she thought the first time they had tea in the library:

We should grow old here together, we should sit like this to our tea as old people, Maxim and I, with other dogs, the successors of these, and the library would wear the same musty smell that it did now. It would know a period of glorious shabbiness and wear when the boys were young - our boys - for I saw them sprawling on the sofa with muddy boots, bringing with them always a litter of rods, and cricket bats, great clasp-knives, bows-and-arrows.

On the table there, polished now and plain, an ugly case would stand containing butterflies and moths, and another one with birds' eggs, wrapped in cotton wool. 'Not all this junk in here', I would say, 'take them to the schoolroom, darlings,' and they would run off, shouting, calling to one another, but the little one staying behind, pottering on his own, quieter than the others.

What a vivid imagination this very young woman has! That little detail about the youngest boy being quieter than the others is just lovely.

Anyway, I've managed to find the one and only passage I noticed that suggests Maxim also expects to have children. It's very late on, after the inquest.

'We'll start again, once this thing is behind us. We can do it, you and I. It's not like being alone. The past can't hurt us if we are together. You'll have children too.'

@SydneyCarton oh that's reminded me that I was going to try and get a copy of "Caroline'.
I think it was on last year's Christmas list.

I found Catcher in the Rye really holds up to re-reading. I’ve read it a few times over the last few years - out loud to my kids as teenagers. HC is funny and interesting.
The Little House on the Prairie books were horrifying - especially the one where Pa moves them further into the middle of nowhere just because they’ve now got neighbours as near as 10 miles away - so that they’re miles away from anyone. They all get fever and the baby is the only one who isn’t delirious and they’re only saved by a random, passing doctor.

@Needmorelego Prairie Fires is on my to-be-read list, and I also have Let The Hurricane Roar, which is Rose’s retelling of her parents’ early married life. I’ve also got a sample on my kindle of a book called Caroline, which is the LHOTP story from Ma’s perspective (novelised, rather than a biography). It starts off with her having to make the canvas cover for the wagon after Charles basically comes home and tells her he’s sold the house and they’re moving West…..

The Tombs of Atuan is my favourite of that trilogy, and Arha is a great character. I think when I read it first I was young enough to have no idea what a eunuch was, or why they might be particularly suited to service at an all-female temple…)

@tobee , I think @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g was wondering why the de Winters haven’t had children — I agree it’s one of the (many) unanswered questions in the ‘now’ of the novel. Like why are they wandering miserably around the Mediterranean, dreaming of England, when, even if Manderley has burnt down, Max is still wealthy, and the owner of an enormous estate? Is he afraid of being charged, despite Colonel Julyan being happy with the ‘motive’ that explained Rebecca’s death? Or of gossip — has Jack Favell put around rumours? (Which are only going to gain momentum when Maxim never returns to England…) Why not rebuild Manderley, or, at least a modest house? Or if that’s too upsetting, build a buy a house else, in England or on the continent? There’s no need to skulk from hotel to hotel.

And Max should in fact be concerned with having an heir, as would have been normal for his class. He’s obsessed with his estate to the point where it going to another man’s child makes him frenzied, so you imagine he’d be more concerned with having a son to inherit.

But that’s a slightly odd point even with Rebecca — assuming they were married more than a year or two, her not having a baby would have been noted as a negative, no matter how beautiful and popular she was locally…