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!

Another one for Catcher in the Rye. As a teen it was awesome. As an adult it was over indulgent twaddle, lol.

The Slap by Christian Tsiolkas(?). Loved it first time around - couldn't put it down - read it again during lockdown and hated it. Full of vile people behaving badly.

The tv adaptation was good though.

@PossumintheHouse Oh Goosebumps are SO badly written! And the awful cliffhanger endings to each chapter. I still enjoy reading them to my kids though 😂

Oh my goodness 100% this. She basically abandoned Nancy then despised her and then left all her money to some random girl with pale eyelashes and a boy who reminded her of some bloke she shagged 40 years ago. First time I read it I thought it was very romantic, with my 50 yo head on I could imagine it being a thread in AIBU.

I used to LOVE Louise Bagshawe's books when I was in my late teens. I had them all - painstakingly sourced from local charity shops. Now, I read them and just think, 'What IS this shit?!'.

Hard agree also with all the Second Mrs. de Winter Haters. She is so colourless. Rebecca's the only Mrs. de Winter worth writing about!

@PudgeControlsTheWeather

So did I 😂 . They are shockingly awful

Patrick Leigh Fermour’s ‘A Time of Gifts’. I adored it aged about 20. Took it on holiday with us recently (now in my 40s) as I though DH would enjoy it. Luckily I picked it up first for a happy reread. There were bits that were still fascinating (descriptions of pre WW2 Europe) but it was so pretentious!

Pride and Prejudice. Read it too many times, perhaps.

@LadyMacbethWasMisunderstood I hated Tess when I read it as a teenager! So depressing. Have refused to read anything else by Thomas Hardy since.

I loved Crime and Punishment back then but am not sure I would now.

Read and loved Lord of the Rings as a child but no longer enjoy that genre.

The Magic Faraway Tree series. I was absolutely enchanted by them as a child and joined in with the scorn for Connie. When I read them to DCs a few years ago, they just didn't have the charm any longer and they bullied Connie terribly.

On the other hand, I read The Borrowers series to DCs and they are just as wonderful as ever.

IT by Stephen King. I must have read it 20 times- now I think about the seriously questionable sex scenes and it's really uncomfortable!

I was going to say Bridget Jones. Safe to say it has not stood the test of time.

@newnamethanks thats the magicians nephew. They meet diggory’s uncle in the attic of diggory’s own house 😂 the interconnecting attics are incidental really but still fascinate me and still occasionally come up in stories about hosue sales.

But Rebecca is a very ambiguous novel — isn’t there an argument for saying that all the triumph of the nice girl gets her is the awful living death we see in the ‘present’ at the beginning of the novel where she’s living with an elderly murderer for whom she’s covered up, in a series of grim little continental hotels, childless, homeless, longing for England, her entire life devoted to one awful person, so pretty much like her life was when she was companion to Mrs Van Hopper…?

@newnamethanks to be fair, they were evacuated to his house, and there was a woman living there too ;-)

Isn't Tess intended to be a hideously unjust tale?

Ah, thank you merrymouse, memory not what it was. And yes, Tess is as you say. Very irritating in modern eyes.

@newnewnamethanks are you maybe thinking of The Magician's Nephew? The two children in that go exploring through to the attic next door, and the uncle in that was quite creepy if I remember correctly, tricked them into touching a ring that transported them to another realm! Whereas the old man in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was kind to the evacuees I think (in fact was he the Magician's Nephew boy grown up?

Oh sorry just see this comment!

@Aecor Yes! And the whole creepiness of the relationship, the way she doesn’t feel fully adult (until he says that he hated Rebecca - crazy ex anyone?), the way she has to live in these rituals, which he just goes along with - the whole thing is quasi incestuous.

The Thorn Birds. Loved it as a teenager (brought up Catholic so could identify with some of the underlying ideas). I haven’t actually re-read it but I feel no desire to; what seemed so romantic and thrilling at 17 (forbidden love and desire between priest and teenage girl/young woman) looks manipulative and sleazy at 55. Meggie’s family is isolated, dysfunctional and repressed; Ralph de Bricassart is, if not quite narcissistic, at least intolerably self-pitying. It’s quite easy to see how the Church got caught up in so many sex abuse scandals when you read books like this which skate over the misogyny and the power dynamics underlying its moral universe.

I think a lot of Colleen McCullough’s books feature sexually murky relationships. There’s one called Tim which is just peculiar.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is indeed intended to be an unjust tale and that's what makes it brilliant in my eyes. It completely exposes the unjust world that Tess inhabits, just because she is female. But I do find it a bit melodramatic these days.

But I think that's one of the brilliant things about the book. As a teen you think Mrs Bennet is an idiot. As a midlife woman, you realise she genuinely has a job to do, to marry off five girls without decent dowries, to ensure they don't end up as impoverished spinsters begging to stay with better off relatives so they aren't homeless. And her agitation comes from the fact that Mr B is mocking and passive about this urgent issue.

Nights At The Circus - Angela Carter - loved this book when I was 20, tried reading it a few years ago and couldn't get past the first few pages.

I loved the Little House on the Prairie series as a child. As a younger adult they were my comfort reads and I was interested in the history of the time and the lives of the people in the books. Since I had my children I can’t get over things I never even noticed. Particularly the father. He’s supposed to be the adventuring hero of the books, but he’s a selfish arse who makes shitty decisions at every possible opportunity.

The whole premise of the series is that he settles his family somewhere in a roofless shack (in one book a literal hole in the ground), makes a bit of money, builds them a comfortable home and lets them put down roots and find community. As soon as life is pleasant he is compelled to have an adventure. He uproots his wife and tiny children, spends all their money on oxen that’ll die shortly and drives them in a wagon to some godforsaken corner of the wilderness to illegally squat on land and hopefully not get lost in the prairie grass/eaten by wolves/starve to death/freeze to death/typhoid to death. And repeat for 6 books. I find it very difficult to get past. And it was way worse in real life.

Mrs Bennett also has a strong self interest, made plain when she worries that Mr Bennett will fight a duel with Wickham and be killed, and the Collinses will turn them all out.

Such a precarious existence, and Mr B is indeed a total knob about the predicament. And I suppose, it can’t have been an uncommon set of circumstances? I wonder how many Elizabeth Bennetts were persuaded to marry (or eagerly snapped up) their Mr Collins, if the chance offered.