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.

Just reread Lord of the Flies, found it more chilling as an adult (first read it in English at school). Although if I hear the phrase "but I've got the conch" one more time I'll do Piggy myself!

Mansfield Park. Found it really dull when I read it for A level, found it much more interesting when I reread it about 20 years later.

Another vote for Rebecca.

As a young girl I really identified with the heroine; last time I read ( some years ago now) thought she was a bit of a drip.

Must try again.

Mark of a great writer in my opinion.

Tenant of Wildfell Hall is exceptional in my view and far advanced for its time. Just enjoyed the writing when I first read it as a girl.

Jane Eyre -always a new perspective, ditto Wuthering Heights. EB knew a thing or two about domestic violence and alcoholism.

Oh yes, I dismissed LOTF as a teenager (my O level set book) but reading it again a few years ago, it is so sinister, especially with the rise of the far right. And the actual writing is beautiful.

I think a good book will give you something different at every age.

I loved Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, have never read it as an adult as I've always suspected it might be unbearable

I read The Giver by Lois Lowry at 18 when it was first published. Even though 18 was a bit older than it's intended readers (it's a "middle grade" book) the whole "this utopian society is actually dystopian" went completely over my head.
I re read it years later in my early 40s and I was totally mind blown. Reading it as an adult and parent made me view it completely differently.

I read Persuasion fairly regularly. At first (many years ago) I sympathized with Anne, but now I see her as soggy as a wet weekend. She let others dictate her future happiness, and never stood up to either her father, Elizabeth or Lady Russell.

I first read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was the same age as her and could really identify with her, even though she'd been born years before me. I reread after I'd visited the house in Amsterdam where the Frank family had been hidden. It was still heartbreaking.

Not as intellectual as some but I recently re-read (well, on audible) the first two books of the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula le Guin. Back in the day I was madly in love with Sparrowhawk. Still beautifully written. I was much more struck by how book 2 (the Tombs of Atuan) is led by a female figure and how brave she was to overcome the training of the role she was born to, and how Sparrowhawk is really just a catalyst.

Book 3 (the Farthest Shore) is next, but I am waiting for Winter.

@KnottyKnitting I always found the descriptions of how they built and made things out of very basic resources quite fascinating, but what struck me re-reading as a adult is the incredibly back-breaking hardship of carving out a life in what is basically a wilderness. I don't know how Ma Ingalls got through each day without lying down and crying with weariness (maybe she did?), especially the part where they're building the cabin and Pa nearly drops the fucking wall on her .

My mum read them the first time I did, and I totally identified with Laura, the adventure and everything. I was shocked when she said how tiring it must have been for Caroline - every time they were settled, Charles decided it was time time to go west again. I hadn't thought about that side of it at all.
(Growing up in an old farmhouse with no central heating etc, the rest didn't seem so alien.)

@KnottyKnitting @SydneyCarton have you read Pioneer Girl and Prairie Fires?
Pioneer Girl is the original version that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote and it's very different.
Prairie Fires is the "true" about the books and very interesting (covers the theory that Rose basically rewrote the books for publication).
It makes you look at the original books differently.

I think they don't have children in Rebecca @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g. I think there's a sense that they don't when they are living their new life after the fire. Also, iirc it's only "the girl" who daydreams of having children at the start of her marriage when she is first at Manderley. I don't remember de Winter doing so. I think he's far too fucked up for that by then, and probably knows he is, for want of a better description!

We did Tess for A level @CaptainMyCaptain and even at the time I couldn't stand it, thought Hardy was a bit of an old perv with his creation of Tess! And Angel was an appalling hypocritical prig!

The Flowers in The Attic series.

Originally read when I was 11ish.

Horrified reading it back as an adult, and having my own child at the age I was when I read it.

It is not appropriate for a kid to read. 😲

Wuthering Heights remains abysmal

The Tombs of Atuan is my favourite of that trilogy, and Arha is a great character. I think when I read it first I was young enough to have no idea what a eunuch was, or why they might be particularly suited to service at an all-female temple…)

@tobee , I think @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g was wondering why the de Winters haven’t had children — I agree it’s one of the (many) unanswered questions in the ‘now’ of the novel. Like why are they wandering miserably around the Mediterranean, dreaming of England, when, even if Manderley has burnt down, Max is still wealthy, and the owner of an enormous estate? Is he afraid of being charged, despite Colonel Julyan being happy with the ‘motive’ that explained Rebecca’s death? Or of gossip — has Jack Favell put around rumours? (Which are only going to gain momentum when Maxim never returns to England…) Why not rebuild Manderley, or, at least a modest house? Or if that’s too upsetting, build a buy a house else, in England or on the continent? There’s no need to skulk from hotel to hotel.

And Max should in fact be concerned with having an heir, as would have been normal for his class. He’s obsessed with his estate to the point where it going to another man’s child makes him frenzied, so you imagine he’d be more concerned with having a son to inherit.

But that’s a slightly odd point even with Rebecca — assuming they were married more than a year or two, her not having a baby would have been noted as a negative, no matter how beautiful and popular she was locally…

@Needmorelego Prairie Fires is on my to-be-read list, and I also have Let The Hurricane Roar, which is Rose’s retelling of her parents’ early married life. I’ve also got a sample on my kindle of a book called Caroline, which is the LHOTP story from Ma’s perspective (novelised, rather than a biography). It starts off with her having to make the canvas cover for the wagon after Charles basically comes home and tells her he’s sold the house and they’re moving West…..

I found Catcher in the Rye really holds up to re-reading. I’ve read it a few times over the last few years - out loud to my kids as teenagers. HC is funny and interesting.
The Little House on the Prairie books were horrifying - especially the one where Pa moves them further into the middle of nowhere just because they’ve now got neighbours as near as 10 miles away - so that they’re miles away from anyone. They all get fever and the baby is the only one who isn’t delirious and they’re only saved by a random, passing doctor.

@SydneyCarton oh that's reminded me that I was going to try and get a copy of "Caroline'.
I think it was on last year's Christmas list.

I don't think we're told definitively, but from her description at the start it's very hard to see how they could have had children when they were living abroad. I suppose given the upper class propensity to send them to boarding school it's not impossible but it doesn't seem at all likely. I happen to have my copy right here as I haven't put it back on the shelf yet, so here goes. This is what she says she thought the first time they had tea in the library:

We should grow old here together, we should sit like this to our tea as old people, Maxim and I, with other dogs, the successors of these, and the library would wear the same musty smell that it did now. It would know a period of glorious shabbiness and wear when the boys were young - our boys - for I saw them sprawling on the sofa with muddy boots, bringing with them always a litter of rods, and cricket bats, great clasp-knives, bows-and-arrows.

On the table there, polished now and plain, an ugly case would stand containing butterflies and moths, and another one with birds' eggs, wrapped in cotton wool. 'Not all this junk in here', I would say, 'take them to the schoolroom, darlings,' and they would run off, shouting, calling to one another, but the little one staying behind, pottering on his own, quieter than the others.

What a vivid imagination this very young woman has! That little detail about the youngest boy being quieter than the others is just lovely.

Anyway, I've managed to find the one and only passage I noticed that suggests Maxim also expects to have children. It's very late on, after the inquest.

'We'll start again, once this thing is behind us. We can do it, you and I. It's not like being alone. The past can't hurt us if we are together. You'll have children too.'

@Pottingup It would never have occurred to the selfish bastard that his poor company-starved wife might be desperate for some neighbours to escape to socialise with.

I’m sure I read a theory online years ago that Charles Ingalls had bipolar disorder, which explained the erratic nature of the family’s travels as they always seemed to be going to places where nobody else did or at random times, like when they cross the Missouri River and the ice nearly cracks under them). The theory was that the manic phases of the illness drove the bonkers decisions he made.

@SydneyCarton I think it was all down to Ma in Little House that the family ended up staying in the tiny little town of De Smet. The town has never had much more of a population of 1000 or so and nothing grows there - but Ma was like "No more moving".

I read The Bridges of Madison County as a teenager and thought it was a nice enough love story.
I read it again a few years ago and was really moved by the intensity and pain of the love. I guess I hadn't been in love when I first read it.

I tried to re-read a Danielle Steel book as an adult (I devoured them as a young teenager) and honestly....what a load of bilge!

The Adrian Mole diaries are nice to read as an adult, not for the literary trip, but more for the nostalgia of what I was doing when it first came out (we are about the same age). It doesn't age well; I thought my teenage son would enjoy it, but I think it was very much of its time.

@SydneyCarton that's a really interesting theory about Charles Ingalls. It's generally believed that Laura's daughter Rose was Bipolar and it's hereditary isn't it?