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

Wuthering Heights remains abysmal

The Flowers in The Attic series.

Originally read when I was 11ish.

Horrified reading it back as an adult, and having my own child at the age I was when I read it.

It is not appropriate for a kid to read. 😲

I think they don't have children in Rebecca @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g. I think there's a sense that they don't when they are living their new life after the fire. Also, iirc it's only "the girl" who daydreams of having children at the start of her marriage when she is first at Manderley. I don't remember de Winter doing so. I think he's far too fucked up for that by then, and probably knows he is, for want of a better description!

We did Tess for A level @CaptainMyCaptain and even at the time I couldn't stand it, thought Hardy was a bit of an old perv with his creation of Tess! And Angel was an appalling hypocritical prig!

@KnottyKnitting @SydneyCarton have you read Pioneer Girl and Prairie Fires?
Pioneer Girl is the original version that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote and it's very different.
Prairie Fires is the "true" about the books and very interesting (covers the theory that Rose basically rewrote the books for publication).
It makes you look at the original books differently.

My mum read them the first time I did, and I totally identified with Laura, the adventure and everything. I was shocked when she said how tiring it must have been for Caroline - every time they were settled, Charles decided it was time time to go west again. I hadn't thought about that side of it at all.
(Growing up in an old farmhouse with no central heating etc, the rest didn't seem so alien.)

@KnottyKnitting I always found the descriptions of how they built and made things out of very basic resources quite fascinating, but what struck me re-reading as a adult is the incredibly back-breaking hardship of carving out a life in what is basically a wilderness. I don't know how Ma Ingalls got through each day without lying down and crying with weariness (maybe she did?), especially the part where they're building the cabin and Pa nearly drops the fucking wall on her .

Not as intellectual as some but I recently re-read (well, on audible) the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula le Guin. Back in the day I was madly in love with Sparrowhawk. Still beautifully written. I was much more struck by how book 2 (the Tombs of Atuan) is led by a female figure and how brave she was to overcome the training of the role she was born to, and how Sparrowhawk is really just a catalyst.

Book 3 (the Farthest Shore) is next, but I am waiting for Winter.

I first read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was the same age as her and could really identify with her, even though she'd been born years before me. I reread after I'd visited the house in Amsterdam where the Frank family had been hidden. It was still heartbreaking.

I read Persuasion fairly regularly. At first (many years ago) I sympathized with Anne, but now I see her as soggy as a wet weekend. She let others dictate her future happiness, and never stood up to either her father, Elizabeth or Lady Russell.

I read The Giver by Lois Lowry at 18 when it was first published. Even though 18 was a bit older than it's intended readers (it's a "middle grade" book) the whole "this utopian society is actually dystopian" went completely over my head.
I re read it years later in my early 40s and I was totally mind blown. Reading it as an adult and parent made me view it completely differently.

I loved Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, have never read it as an adult as I've always suspected it might be unbearable

I think a good book will give you something different at every age.

Oh yes, I dismissed LOTF as a teenager (my O level set book) but reading it again a few years ago, it is so sinister, especially with the rise of the far right. And the actual writing is beautiful.

Another vote for Rebecca.

As a young girl I really identified with the heroine; last time I read ( some years ago now) thought she was a bit of a drip.

Must try again.

Mark of a great writer in my opinion.

Tenant of Wildfell Hall is exceptional in my view and far advanced for its time. Just enjoyed the writing when I first read it as a girl.

Jane Eyre -always a new perspective, ditto Wuthering Heights. EB knew a thing or two about domestic violence and alcoholism.

Mansfield Park. Found it really dull when I read it for A level, found it much more interesting when I reread it about 20 years later.

Just reread Lord of the Flies, found it more chilling as an adult (first read it in English at school). Although if I hear the phrase "but I've got the conch" one more time I'll do Piggy myself!

I'm in a phase of rereading books that were contemporary when I read them as a teenager and young adult in the 90s - nothing classic, just stuff like Maeve Binchy, Douglas Coupland, Marian Keyes, Michael Crichton. In most ways the 90s feel like yesterday to me but these books are time capsules which being home to me how much the world has changed.

I read Northanger Abbey at 15 and loved it - I empathised so much with Catherine Moreland. I read it again a few years ago and found it hilarious (and proof that teenage girls haven’t changed much in 200 years). Completely missed the humour first time round.

I tried to read Mansfield Park two or three times in my late teens/early 20s and gave up by the third chapter each time finding the main character far too wet. Finally read it last year and really enjoyed it - completely different perspective.

I’ve also found that when rereading Agatha Christie I now empathise with the middle aged women rather than the plucky younger ones or the awkward teenagers!

@MordantandPuckish IKR? And not letting her go and stay with her friend in the holidays in case she falls in love with the brother... gross.

I used to love the Little House on the Prairie books.

Re read them to DD when she was younger and my God they are slow and boring. One had a whole chapter that was basically a carpentry lesson with Pa building a barn!

I loved Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress as a teen. Now, though, it's obvious just how much of a deeply troubling creep he was.

Thank you, Project Gutenberg, for that very odd formatting. I should have credited them for the copy and paste.

Persuasion has always been my favourite Jane Austen novel, largely because when I first read it aged 17 I did identify with Anne (to an extent, anyway). It also had a lot to do with the opening paragraph (I've bolded the phrase that reeled me in):

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, <strong>he could read his own history with an interest which never failed</strong>. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:

“ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.

Sir Walter jumped off the page for me at this point and I was hooked.

I read South Riding by Winifred Holtby in 1974 when it was being dramatised on TV (Dorothy Tutin, Nigel Davenport, fantastic supporting cast, absolutely wonderful adaptation) and it has remained one of my absolute favourites ever since. I suppose with advancing years I've identified more with the elderly Alderman Mrs Burrows than I used to. I like the way she's made the best of a life that could have been very unhappy. Hher husband is a peripheral character, very lightly sketched in, but he also jumps off the page and we know from just a few short details that he is a mean little man in every respect. How she put up with him, I don't know, but of course in the early part of the 20th century most women had no real choice about that. Pragmatism vs idealism is a pretty good framework for a novel - it isn't quite as simple as youth vs age, but not far off.

As a teenager I thought Holden Caufield was an overpriveleged, bratty tosseer.

Re-reading in my 40's I realised he was reacting to the grief and guilt of the death of his younger brother while being neglected by his parents.

(I guess both can be true though).