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

[BigDahliaFan]

Reading Midnight's Children which I realised a few pages in I must have read when I was in my 20s. I'm now 55 and it's a very different experience, funnier for a start, I've also been to India now, twice. And the world is a very different place too.

Anything you've read where your perception has changed radically.

Bumping this because I think this is a good question!

Couldn't think of one but now I can 😆

I did Howard's End for A Level and I enjoyed it but I really didn't get it on the same level as after I'd had a bit more life experience. Instead of reading HE though I listened to Edward Petherbridge reading it beautifully. At 16 I didn't really understand adult relationships and had a lot less knowledge of the society and culture of the early 1900s than I do now.

I would say now I have a wider reference all together.

I think any book you reread regularly shifts. I’ve probably read Jane Eyre annually since the age of ten, and I’m in my early fifties now. It was a book about an unloved little girl when I was ten. In my teens it was a swoonsome love story between a plain, brilliant woman and a devastatingly attractive man. In my student days I realised Rochester was a bastard, that all his relationships with women are appalling, and Bronte lets him off the hook throughout. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve found Jane herself increasingly self-righteous and dogmatic, and have increasing sympathy for Blanche Ingram.

I adored 101 Dalmatians. A wonderful school teacher read it aloud to us when we were in 4th class. I tried reading it to my son and I was having to edit too heavily so gave it up. I still like Dodie Smith and love I Capture the Castle and have given it to several of my daughters' friends.

I certainly didn't see Mr. Bennett as the useless man he was when I first read Pride and Prejudice and thought Mrs Bennet was a comic turn instead of a voice expressing the real fear that gentry women had if they weren't independently wealthy or married to someone of means.

I cried reading The L Shaped Room at 16. How could she possibly go on without Toby? Now I think "plenty more fish in the sea, you'll be grand"

It varies tremendously, unpredictably liking it more, or less. I like to imagine I'm smarter now so a more astute reader - and certainly more knowledgeable about allusions.

The wildest flip for me was that at some point I decided to seriously read Dickens. I think I got through Pickwick and Oliver Twist, was completely bored and stopped. Years later, I returned, determined to try again, just in the interest of being a well-read person. Loved it all. Well, most of it. Imagine my surprise.

This also brings me back to The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett - the lovely passage where she returns to the Ivy Compton-Burnett which she'd found so tedious, but now finding it delightful.

I tried to reread Flowers in the Attic last year, I read it as a teen and thought it was thrilling, something shockingly grown up and forbidden. I realised after a couple of chapters it's just trash and deleted it immediately.

I re-read Rebecca the other day. I've read it at least twice before, but not for a while. First time would probably have been not far off 50 years ago - gulp - and I've also seen the Hitchcock film several times (strongly recommended - excellent casting, especially from the three leads). It was a bit of a jolt to see so clearly now that Maxim has more red flags than a string of bunting! The unnamed second Mrs de Winter should have run a mile. Mrs Van Hopper was right, oddly enough.

Also, reading it now I wonder why they never had any children. They certainly planned to at the outset and people keep assuming that she's looking ill and tired, and prone to fainting, because she's in the early stages of pregnancy, but of course she isn't. Do we think they decided to have no children so they could wander round the Med unencumbered, or did Maxim decide it was best to let his line die out, or did they have unanticipated fertility problems, or did it perhaps become a sexless marriage for psychological reasons? Mrs de Winter certainly seems to be in the position of carer as much as wife, judging by her description in the first chapter of their peripatetic life of recent years.

Of course, the way we see Maxim now is very different from how people would have seen him in 1938. He had a cast-iron case for divorce from Rebecca, so why on earth didn't he do that? He just needed to be clever about gaining evidence. Also, the idea of marrying a woman half his age and as he says himself, young enough to be his daughter, doesn't look good now.

Great read, though!

I used to think Brideshead Revisited was my favourite book. Re reading it, I was appalled by the misogyny, the snobbery, the utter conviction that the class structure was here to stay and rightly so....

I'd like to go back to Dickens. I read Bleak House at school and skipped over a lot...I wonder if I'd have more patience now. I've also never reread Wuthering Heights after dismissing it as pap at school...wonder what I'd think now?

@CurlewKate I loved Brideshead and have been scared of rereading it in case it was just too awful.

Daddy-Long-Legs - thought it was so romantic when I first read it as a teenager - now it's just a bit creepy and controlling.

Also Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I studied at uni - again, thought her relationship with Tea Cake was so romantic (which I suppose it is a bit at the beginning) but I think she was well shot of him now 😂

I've read Tess of the D'Urbervilles several times since I was a teenager. As an adult I realised Angel Clare was a worse bastard than Alec D'Urberville in many ways.

In Pride and Prejudice Mrs Bennet was definitely the more sensible parent trying to secure a future for her daughters although not necessarily in the way she did it. That's not the way it was presented when I did it for A Level.

I read My Cousin Rachel as respite from A-Level revision forty-odd years ago and loved it. My sympathies were mostly with Philip Ashley; like the second Mrs de Winter, he's vulnerable and in thrall to an older, more sophisticated and charismatic love interest. When I read it many years later, I still loved it, but my sympathies were much more with Rachel, who I saw as beset by the attentions of a needy puppy. I understand why Philip is insecure, but I also see Rachel's behaviour as an attempt to wrest back control; she's not just playing with him.

Wuthering Heights at 14 - lovely, romantic, Heathcliff the ultimate Byronic hero etc.

Wuthering Heights at 20 something. What a lot of overwrought tosh. Also, Heathcliff is an abusive monster.

Wuthering Heights at 30. Similar. But I can appreciate the tender relationship between little Cathy and her father.

Wuthering Heights at 52, when I've acquired a broader understanding of the Gothic and the context for the novel. Heathcliff is still abusive, but that's not all he is. I can also see the humour more; Joseph isn't just background, he's an egregious old sinner and he makes me laugh.

Bleak House is well worth reading again- so many different sub-plots and characters.

I see what you did there with the demise of Tea Cake.

Daddy-Long-Legs is incredibly creepy. It always lines up in my head with Mr Rochester dressing up as a gypsy fortune-teller to test Blanche Ingram by telling her the man she's setting her cap at isn't as rich as she supposes and to try to trick Jane Eyre into admitting she's in love with him. No wonder it gets left out of all the adaptations. I mean 'I'm paying your way through university on the grounds that you write me a monthly letter to which I will never reply, but will secretly infiltrate myself into your life and keep reading the letters in which you describe me and my courtship.' Ugh.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g -- Rebecca is a very rich reread. I think it takes an adult to recognise how much reading against the grain you have to do to remain aware that the supposedly childlike and innocent nameless heroine spends the end of the novel aiding and abetting a murderer who kills for his house. He's apparently grudgingly OK with the adultery, but it's the thought of Manderley going to some other man's child that makes him act.

And that Hitchcock had to change that because the Hays code meant he couldn't depict a murder getting away scot-free with his crime!

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g absolutely agree about Rebecca. It remains my favourite book and the Hitchcock film is brilliant. But yes, run a mile!

Persuasion I dismissed as one of the duller Jane Austen’s when I was younger but over the years it has become my favourite. Possibly because when I first read it as a teenager I didn’t see myself in Anne or empathise with her but looking back from my fifties I see so much more in her.

I was going to ask about this one 😂

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).

@Tdp123 I thought Catcher in the Rye might be unreadable now....maybe it's worth a try to get that different perspective.

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.

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

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.

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!

@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 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!

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.