Books you enjoyed as a young 'un and now think are utter nonsense

[LadyJaye]

Inspired by a previous thread.

The Catcher In The Rye: brilliant when you're 14, insufferable at 41.

On The Road: ditto

American Psycho: the only book I've ever refused to finish reading

Anything by Tolkien: my undergraduate degree was in linguistics.

I remembering tearfully defending The Thornbirds as a Great Work to a skeptical nun at my boarding school. She was right, it was utter tripe.

I was also spellbound by Flowers in the Attic and Lace.

I went on to study English Lang & Lit at Oxford

My husband bought me a second hand copy for our lace anniversary. Couldn’t find a new copy.

Loving this thread.

I never read Lace but I remember friends at school being obsessed with it. Was there a mini series on tv at some point?

Totally agree with so many of these.

As a child, it would be pretty much anything by Enid Blyton. Dd was given a set of Famous 5 books years ago. When I read them to her, I could cope with the sexism (just made them seem old fashioned) but the snobbery really shocked and angered me.

My teenage loves that wouldn't bear rereading include Flowers in the Attic (I was given the first one as a Christmas present and then devoured all the sequels) and Dennis Wheatley.

On the other hand, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was mentioned earlier. They're not great works of literature but the Narnia books are still my go to comfort reads.

I didn't try The Catcher in the Rye until I was an adult so maybe that's why I've always thought it was awful and couldn't understand the love for it.
We had to study Whuthering Heights for A Level. Even as a teenager, I thought it was a pile of self-indulgent, overwritten rubbush and had no patience with any of the main characters. I preferred Charlotte Bronte and Anne to Emily.

Me too @cariadlet re Narnia. Especially The Silver Chair at this time of year.

But what happens with the goldfish bowl in Lace?

Nothing happens with a goldfish bowl RosieLemonade but one of the side character's sex moves is to insert a live goldfish into his partner's vagina as foreplay.

I used to love the Georgia Nicholson books by Louise Rennison. Proper adored them as a teen and would read them over and over sniggering. Me and my mates all used the slang from them.

Reread them in my mid twenties as I bought a set for my classroom. My God I wanted to slap some sense into that girl! Thats when I knew I had become a boring grownup!

I was also obsessed with the Heartland (healing horses, healing hearts) books. What a load of utter, sentimental tripe they were!

Agree a lot of Victorian books such as Wolves of Willoughby Chase, The Little Princess etc. were enjoyable as a child but looking back are very preachy. See also the overt religious overtones pf the Narnia books where lipstick makes one a fallen woman!

I was too atheist or too dim to pick up the religious bits in Narnia.

DH Lawrence was a horrible bastard and deeply weird about sex. He was probably impotent due to his illnesses and let his wife go off shagging whoever (i.e he was Connie's Husband character). Once you understand and accept that DH Lawrence books are good and the only writer to get away with the farty over the top writing IMO.

I tried to read Lady Chatterly's Lover as a teenager and was so bored I gave up.
I read it properly for the first time this year and actually found it quite interesting though not very sexy.
I like the fact that DH Lawrence is arguing that women can want and enjoy sex which if you think about the time it was written was pretty revolutionary.
It's dated and makes it's point in a heavy handed way but I think it isn't without merit

Yeah it was banned for about 40 years in the UK. Had to be smuggled in from Italy

I also came on to say 'The Catcher In The Rye' loved it from about 12 and all through my teens. Now what to give HC a slap!

@Misbeehived

I’ve come back because I’ve just seen a tweet by Naomi Woolf - I get the feeling No Logo may not be as intellectually robust as I imagined at the time.

No Logo is Naomi Klein, isn't it? I always get the names mixed up but Klein is definitely the most robust of the two.

I never liked Holden Caulfield but I was 13 going on 53. I gather that he's supposed to be perceived like that though and the book is still good, IMO. Possibly, I feel more sorry for him now as an adult.
The thing which bothered me most about the book is the way the title related to it. I've always reckoned that Salinger had come up with a rather "literary" sounding title and, unable to write a book from it, shoehorned the eponymous song into the book.

Th Shopaholic series, or anything by Sophie Kinsella really. Loved them 10-15 years ago when I was early 20s and eagerly awaited new releases. Read her most recent one a couple of years ago and was SO irritated by the main character. Not sure if her writing has got worse or if I’ve grown up! But I haven’t dared reread the shopaholic ones to check.

Some of these posts are not accepting of the fact that some of the story/style/characterisation is of its time, yes, but still great literature. eg Huckleberry Finn. Yes, it has racism in it. But that was how American was then - hugely racist, so it wouldn't make sense for it not to contain any. I'm a school librarian and I still have it on my shelves. Funnily enough no-one ever picks it up as it just doesn't have wide appeal to a teenage audience these days. If anyone has picked it up I have a conversation warn them about the racism and say it has historical relevance and they need to be strongly aware of that. I would strongly advise any student who wasn't astute or "worldly" or well-read, or anyone who has made racist comments in the past.

Similarly, with Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester seems very cold. But men WERE then. If you were wealthy you were supposed to marry into the right family, not for love. There wasn't any sexual equality. I don't think it's any great romance. It's just a story about a dutiful woman from a difficult background recognising SOME semblance of humanity and affection buried very deep in an uptight, staid gentleman of the time, and him recognising something good in HER qualities. I love it. There is no true happy ending. They end up with each other but not in a heading off in the sunset romantic way. It's just a quiet acceptance of how things are with each other.

I think with literature you can love a character for being well-written or interesting. You don't have to LIKE them. Think of Fagin and Bill Sykes. No-one wants an Oliver Twist without them, just because they were terribly cruel towards children and this is not something we want to hear in the modern age of child protection and welfare. Dickens was an important social commentator. Again, of historical importance, and it adds another strand to his literature when you read it now.

We can go back and re-read books from years ago through new eyes because we're a bit more enlightened now than when they were written. And that is an education in itself, recognising how society has changed so much that they would not be put into publication if written today.

We should all read widely because it helps to cultivate literary good taste and we can become discerning readers. I remember enjoying things like Diary of a Nobody and Three Men in a Boat around the time I was also reading Jane Green and other chicklit trash in my 20s, along with Ian McEwan and Dickens. All books have their place. The worst thing is to read nothing but the same genre.

I can fully understand English Lit graduates having read trashy stuff when they were younger!

I picked up a book (free thank goodness) the other day which was a modern version of a Chalet School book which was written by a woman from India. The racism in that was appalling, I'm surprised it was ever published. It was published in 2006 so they can't claim that it was 'of it's time'. Was that "Two Chalet Girls In India"? It was set in the early 1940's, so it's bound to be dated.

Just laughing as I remember reading The Thorn Birds when I was about 13 and so much of it must have gone over my head as I was completely unmoved by a priest and a teenage girl's illicit affair. Wasn't "Meggy" meant to be about 13?

I agree that literary styles change too. Jackie Collins writing about red Ferraris and "hot studs" is so dated now.

@TeenyTinyDustinHoffman Yes you’re right! Oh thank goodness. I’ve been confusing them for years! . My faith in my teenage taste restored.

This is my fave thread in ages!

I found a big pile of my old children's books a while back and have been re-reading them. So many of them don't stand up!

Noel Streatfeild's the Painted Garden (aka "Movie Shoes") which I remember as a delight, totally spoiled by the blatant favouritism of two of the children and massive scapegoating and emotional abuse of the third. The parents' behaviour reminded me of about a thousand MN threads on how to deal with difficult parents. For example the "plain untalented" daughter lands a huge movie role, understandably struggles a little bit to adjust (then soon finds her feet and works incredibly hard and gives an amazing performance). During the time she's struggling the dad goes around telling everyone including the other children how shit she is at acting and how she's going to be fired. When she brags about how good she's getting at playing a musical instrument the mum immediately turns round and announces to her siblings "no she's not she's total shit lol I spent all my time apologising for what a terrible racket she makes." It's painful to read, especially when the entire book makes out she's a bad little girl for being angry and miserable.

There's also a really weird bit where the oldest child concocts a plot to give the famous dancing maestro a sexy glam photo of herself because she's certain that's the way to get his attention and then he'll take her on as a dancer. Even though she's been in his dancing classes for months and singularly failed to impress him.

The parents also go on holiday with the wife's best friend (who lives with them and goes everywhere with them wtf) leaving the kids alone with their aunt, who is completely demonised even though she lets the entire family plus best friend stay with her for free for a year, has to put up with them making constant demands, and the aunt clearly has some kind of serious illness.

Wuthering Heights. All breathtakingly romantic when I was 17.

Read it a couple of decades later and wanted to bang their stupid heads together.

Oh and the Sadlers Wells series. I do still love those books but the author can't keep even basic details. A big part of the first book is the main character Veronica being bullied by her older cousin, in later books Veronica is in her late 20s and the older cousin is celebrating her 21st birthday. The books are littered with errors like that. In one book a character celebrates her birthday with her famous dancer friend, a few chapters later she goes to see the same dancer perform and has clearly never met her before.

And something I definitely didn't pick up on as a child is the amount of grown men falling in love/lust with girls under 16. In one the villain (at least 30) asks a 15 year old out on a date, and apart from wishing she had better taste no one raises an eyebrow. Her 'true love' decides not to propose to her on the grounds, "I'm only 18 and too young to be getting married" - no mention of her being 15 and them never having been on a date or kissed might be barriers too.

Even the "romances" are full of declarations like, "I fell in love with you when I rescued you from that horse" (incident took place when the girl was 12) or "To me my wife will always be the little girl dancing barefoot on the grass I fell in love with" (from a guy who decides to propose to the women he's not spoken to since she was 15 because the had one argument).

I loved Stig of the Dump as a kid.

Tried reading it to DS.

So boring. Just so, so boring.