Has your Taste in Books changed over the Years?

[BaconAndAvocado]

I'm 44 and have become aware that the books I'm drawn to these days are very very different to the ones I read in my 20s and even 30s.

Back then I would read the likes of Milan Kundera, Nabokov, Ian McEwan, quite literary fare?

And the books I would have sniffed at, crime, thrillers, I'm really enjoying now.

Have I dumbed down in my mid-life literary crisis or am I now just less of a book snob?

Currently reading a Mark Haddon, which apparently, according to a writer friend, falls into the "accessible literature" category.

There is plenty of modern HB too, but those are the classics to use as a springboard. My favourite British, sadly gone is Derek Raymond, his autobiography is great too, post war, public school boy living a louche life in soho. His Factory series are really really dark, finishes with I was Dora Suarez, makes me cry.
Stuart Macbride is great, dark but funny (DS Steele is cracking)

Yes my tastes have changed.
In my teens in the 1970s - Historic romances by Anya Seaton; all of George Orwell, Solzhenitsyn (was feeling pretentious). Fantasy by Stephen Donaldson.
In my twenties in the 1980s ; Wilber Smith, cold war spy thrillers
In my thirties in the nineties; chic lit and a few more classics
In the last 15 years since DC I have read mostly crime fiction and thrillers with the odd Erica James type.

I'm in my 40's also I don't think my taste has changed much since my teens. I still like literary fiction and crime. I think that some contemporary crime fiction writers are just as good as literary fiction and reading them doesn't mean you've dumbed down. I would rank John Connolly, James Lee Burke, Benjamin Black, Jo Nesbo, Denis Lehane and Peter Robinson very highly as writers. I like Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay for an easy read. I've rarely read any chick-lit but intend to read a Jilly Cooper at some stage to see what I've been missing.

Thanks mmack for the quality crime recommendations!

Will look into them