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.

@Needmorelego Yes, I think the theory started with Rose’s diagnosis and worked backwards to look at Charles’ behaviour to see if it fitted a pattern as well. I don’t think Laura had depression but not sure about any of her sisters.

Lowering the tone somewhat here, but Jilly Coopers Octavia. The only JC book Ive ever read but I found it so glamorous as a young teen. I read it and re-read it. Went back to it a couple of years ago - what a pile of misogynistic crap!

WH is just hysterical rambling for the most part. Heathcliffe was treated appallingly as a child, though, being brought into the family as a 'pet' no wonder he turned out as he did.

Enid Blyton the Magic Faraway Tree books were my favourite childhood read. I read them again 50 years later and loved them and the memories they brought back, happy days.

Perhaps I should read Wuthering Heights again. I read it when I was young and hated Cathy & Heathcliff, thought it was a shame to spoil two houses. Not sure I would change my mind though.

I've started to re-read books in the last few years. Partly because I've read all of Dicken's novels over the course of several decades and wanted to read the ones I read in my youth again, and to re-read various. books I did as part of my degree and liked. I've re-read Hard Times (the first Dickens I read) and Great Expectations (my favourite Dickens) and enjoyed both. I think it's going to be Bleak House next. Also re-read Eliot's Middlemarch, which I really liked at uni.

This year I re-read the book I always told everyone was my favourite, 'The Master & Margarita' by Bulgakov and that confirmed why I love it. I don't think I appreciated quite how unique and moving it was in my teens, as well as funny and magnificently weird.

Also want to re-read The Great Gatsby and Slaughterhouse 5 in the next year or so.

Yes - same. My daughter complained that it was all building and cooking! I still occasionally re-read ‘Those Happy Golden Years’ though. I tried re-reading John Fowles’s ‘The Magus’ - which I was spellbound by at 18 and found it utterly unreadable.

It’s the only book I genuinely don’t think should be available to teenagers. It’s really nasty.

That’s plausible! Re-reading it as a mother of small children was very different to reading it as a child and I was fighting tears sometimes! The poor wife - who might just want access to medical care for her babies or some kind of company.

I felt the same about Their Eyes Were Watching God - younger me accepted him partying without her. Older me was shocked at how much my perspective had shifted - I did NOT accept his apology upon his return! I still love that book, though!

I was enthralled by Kim, by Rudyard Kipling at some point in my childhood, I remember that clearly. When I went back to it, several decades later, not only did I recall nothing of what I was reading, I couldn’t get into it and gave up after a few chapters. Perhaps I should try again, listening this time might be better

No intellectual, but for a bit of light reading I decided to reread Jilly Coopers Riders and I am enjoying it and can almost remember it word for word, I last read it about 35 years ago!

I love this thread, great question.

I have just found a copy of Waterland in a charity shop, it was a massive deal in the late 1980s. I haven't started reading it yet, but just looking at the odd paragraph is a strange multi-layered experience, it really takes me back very vividly to my sixth form days.

Middlemarch, I didn't quite realise how awful Casaubon was as a teenager.

And re-reading The Handmaids Tale, which I did for A level, as a mother. God that is a painful book.

Completely agree with pp who said the Tenant of Wildfell Hall is ahead of its time. It's an astonishing read, unbelievably progressive and very vivid sense of place. Also loving the discussion of Rebecca.

OMG I cannot wait for the TV adaptation of this

Like pp Middlemarch is my favourite book to come back to and take something different from at each stage of life.

I always identified with Dorothea because I was studious (even if I thought she was an idiot for marrying Casaubon) but now I'm in my mid-30s I feel really bad for Rosamund and how much was her parents' responsibility and they set her up for failure.

I loved the Secret History SO much when I first read it, and I still love it but now see the characters as pretentious. As a teenager I thought they were all so glamorous.

The book that absolutely traumatised me as a parent that had just been 'ok' as a teen was Pet Semetary. Extremely disturbing once you've had a child. I read it years ago and still think about it every couple of months.

I love to think about what I'll read differently in the future ☺️

I recently reread The House On The Brink by John Gordon which had so thrilled me as a young reader but as an adult it was hard to push past all the misogyny. I felt more forgiving toward Moonfleet when rereading that.

Aldous Huxley was the first 'serious' writer I got into. He dazzled me in my late teens/early twenties. I thought he was the very definition of urbane, sophisticated brilliance. Recently, I re-read his great novels (Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza etc) and had a slightly different experience. I still think he's a wonderful writer, but he seems more limited – a bit too cold and detached, unable to get inside ordinary people and bring them vividly to life, etc. He's no Dickens, put it that way. I understood a lot more of what he said (much of it went over my head when I first read him).

I have a slightly lower opinion of Wuthering Heights today, but an even higher one of Pride and Prejudice. Thomas Hardy' prose grates on me now. I still think he's an extraordinary storyteller, but a clunky stylist. As I get older, my opinion of Dickens is more mixed. For vivid characters and brilliant, one off scenes, he's unbeatable. The older I get, however, the more I prefer George Eliot. Virginia Woolf said that Middlemarch was one of the few novels written for grown-ups, and I kind of see what she means.

Re-reading Evelyn Waugh, I find him every bit as funny and brilliant, but the nastiness and sadism disturbs me more than it used to. I also feel more sensitive to Wilde's arrogance and snobbery. My love for P. G. Wodehouse, however, deepens with every re-read.