Is there a book you used to love but not any more?

[CurlewKate]

Brideshead Revisited used to be my favorite book. I reread it regularly in my 20s and 30s. Now 20 years later I am reading it again, and it seems trite, shallow and pretentious. I'm so disappointed!

I rarely re-read anything because of the disappointment factor, as above.
But I like a raunchy rom-com in novel form and I have read "Welcome to Temptation" by Jennifer Crusie more than once.
Itks a few years old now so no mobile phones etc , but none the worse for that.
The hero is seriously sexy and the heroine is no ditsy stereotype but a real person in her own right.

White Oleander. When I was young and full of angst it was amazing. Now I'm middle aged every character is just awful and there's some highly questionable parts.

Sort of… The Catcher in the Rye. I LOVED it as a teenager. I can still appreciate it as an adult, in a very different way, but perhaps unsurprisingly don’t have the same emotional connection to it that I had as a disaffected teen

Jemima J by Jane Green used to be a favourite. But re-reading it and seeing she gets the man by getting skinny…. Not so empowering

I loved Tess of the D’Urbevilles when I was a teenager. That was in the 1980s. I chose to discuss the symbolism and the rural landscape in my university interview. I found it tragic yet romantic. Fool I was.

Four decades on I hate the book. The misogyny (which was acknowledged in the 80s, but only to a degree), the idea that Tess was a “fallen woman”, the horrible ending; I felt despair when I tried to re-read it. None of the pretty words or lush descriptions (which remain, objectively, just as lovely as ever they were) can make up for the overwhelming injustice.

Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Feels very like inappropriate relationships now.

The Time Traveller's Wife feels rather over-sentimental now. I was really disappointed by The Eyre Affair as an adult. Thursday was clearly written male then switched last minute. I loved that as a teenager because she was so kick-arse, but rereading as an adult everything about her jars.

I agree with this. It was one of my set texts at Uni and I loved it and read it over and over. Tried to read it again recently and it was really annoying.

The Girl In The Swing by Richard Adams. I loved this as a teen, thought it was romantic. Now I see it as depraved and cannot reconcile the actions of the main character with the author's adoration of her.

Actually I suppose I should correct that to the NARRATOR'S adoration of her.

I do think of that book often though, it still confuses me.

Chicken Soup for the Soul I feel exactly the same as you!!

It actually turned out I had "Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul" I found it in an old box and it was barf inducing.

I recently decided to revisit the big Jilly Cooper bonkbusters I used to adore in the 80s and 90s and was shocked by the casual racism and homophobia, which I'm ashamed to say rather passed me by in my teens and early twenties. I was aware of a whiff of misogyny when I first read them, but I found it much worse than I remembered and impossible to handwave away in the name of a racy, pacy story. I still love her plotting and characterisation and the beautiful way she writes about nature and the seasons, but it proved a very uncomfortable and disappointing re-read.

Wuthering Heights 😭 I lived and breathed the novel as a teen. I so want to still love it, but I just find the characters hideous. I also find the character of Jane in ‘Jane Eyre’ so whiny now. I have really grown the love ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ though.

I used to love Piers Anthony's Xanth series as a teenager. When I reread them as an adult, I was horrified by the rampant misogyny. Utterly vile.

I adore JE still, but am sharply aware when reading that Rochester is a bastard the narrator works very hard to hoodwink us into rooting for, by presenting him as the victim of his first wife’s propensities and asking us to admire him for refusing to hit her or keep her locked up at his other, damp mansion, when in fact he married for money (as Blanche Ingram is sneered at for trying to), and all his relationships with women (Bertha, Celine, Jane) involve powerplay, manipulation and actual or threatened cruelty. The novel’s ’happy ending’ is highly ambiguous, his own possessiveness being backed up by patriarchal, early 19thc marriage laws which mean that Jane, independently wealthy and self-sufficient, the moment she marries him, loses her right to her money, custody of her children in the event of separation, and , becomes legally part of him.

I agree about the Jilly Cooper books - I still love many of those early ones, but don’t enjoy Riders any more. We’re all meant to love Rupert (and he was the object of my first ever crush as a teenager!) but in this book he’s so incredibly awful and abusive to Helen that I find it a difficult read.

Absolutely Jemima J by Jane Green. The way she is described you are thinking she would be a size 26 plus. She gets on the scales at the gym and she’s 14 something I think. And she’s not short. Then she becomes a hardbody etc.

A young aspirational me was all yes… I can turn myself round like her. Be pretty and successful. Honestly.

I can’t read Jane Green at all now. The early books based in London are very much of their time, late 90’s and early noughties chick-lit. Her later books when she moved to the USA are too American and small town. I read the back of new ones and eye roll about the small town in Connecticut.

I was enchanted by the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when young and bought.it to read to my young grandchildren. In the opening chapters, the children find their way into the house next door where an old man lives alone. Don't re-call the detail but no, not for modern eyes. Just a description of a - totally innocent - situation that would give parents the heebie jeebies.

@Aecor and @MrsJellybee

I completely agree.

I read and adored WH & JE as a teenager. Now trying to read them as a 50-year-old 😳

When I was a teen I just loved The Shellseekers by Rosamund Pilcher. Read it a few times and found it romantic and cosy and delightful. Re-read it last year and realised that the main character is a pain in the bum. Two of her kids are disappointing to her but it's clear that they're this way because she was just a shit mum. And her darling third child, her daughter, who we're supposed to admire is a pompous arse!

I used to be a HUGE Irvine Welsh fan. Re-read his books, bought every new one that came out. Stopped for a while and then a few years ago I tried one of my favourites - Skagboys. I honestly was so horrified I couldn’t believe this was something I used to love. Absolutely harrowing. I won’t touch any of his books now.

Oh Aecor, poor Jane Eyre. Have you read the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys? It's Bertha's story, the mad Mrs Rochester in the attic. Highly recommended.

Bridget Jones. Always enjoyed the books but thought the films were better. Tried to re-read BJ Diary 's few weeks ago and it's just awful. A bit like Jemima J, the author makes her to be huge and she's really not.

I’m interested in what was awful about Bridget Jones, I’ve not read it in years now!

I loved The Go Ask Alice book when I was a teen. It seemed so dark and real, a life anyone could get sucked into. Reread it as an adult and it seems obvious it was hokum.