What has been your reactions rereading noteworthy(to you) books 20 + years later.
Ex: how could I have been so dumb,smart,naive, different, etc…from now.
I’m 62 years old. In my teens I discovered the Bantam reprints of Doc Savage. I LOVED them, rip roaring adventure stories for young males. I had almost all of the paperbacks. Long gone now of course.
I saw the first one I ever read at a used book store and figured I’d get it and relive my past. BIG mistake. Oh my gosh they were badly written. It was a monthly magazine back it the thirties so the stories were written very fast with no revision for pennies a word. I got through the first one, tried another one and only got two chapters into it before I put it down. I won’t try the Shadow reprints or the Avenger reprints. lol
Lovecraft. It is important to have read the Mythos but very difficult to read it as an adult.
Lovecraft…oh yes. I tried to read him in my middle twenties and my brain just shut down. My older brother laughed and said I started when I was too old. He got into him when he was 13 years old. The perfect age to read Lovecraft.
When I read The Fountainhead when I was 17, I thought it was cool. I tried to read it again in my 20’s and started laughing.
I first read Dune as a young teen and loved it. I have read it as an adult and still got caught up in it.
I’m right now rereading Zelazny’s Amber books which I first read as a teenager - still pretty great, but not as great as they are if you’re 15.
There are still a dozen books I still reread every 10/15 years,Pratchett, Tolkiens, LeGuin, mostly for comfort and to remember what good prose looks like,but I tend to shy from rereading out of curiousity, the cat always get killed.
It makes me aware of how susceptible I was of other’s opinions and how opinionated i was.This being said I still think Faulkner and K. Dick is tripes.
I guess a succsessful reread is when you still agree with yourself.
Still some falling out are hard , like with Hemmingway, altho that might be changing again.
John Saul. Used to read him all the time, went and reread one of his books a few months ago, And felt like he used words for the sake of using big words. Not as good as I remembered. However V.C. Andrews was just as bad as I remembered, and still couldn’t pit it down.
Jo Walton calls this ‘The Suck Fairy’.
On the other end of the scale: When I first read C. S. Lewis’ A Horse and his Boy as a child, it was kind of blah, and probably my least favorite of the Narnia books. Re-reading it as an adult, though, I realized just how jam-packed it was with symbolism, that I had never noticed before but could now appreciate. It’s now probably my second-favorite.
I’ve seen it the other way – I hated Great Expectations when I read it in high school, but when I read it for graduate school, I discovered it’s a damn fine novel.
I do reread my favorites, but they all tend to hold up. I either was aware of the flaws the first time along (and don’t reread) or liked books that were well written.
When I first read “Tehanu,” the fourth book in Ursula K. LeGuin’s “Earthsea” trilogy, I didn’t like it. I thought it shoehorned too much feminist thought into a bronze-age culture, and that it just didn’t work.
I’ve re-read it three times since, and each time, I find I like it more and more. The feminist motifs can be seen as “universal” motifs, part of human nature. The effort at an enlightened outlook is not dependent on industrial age reformations, but can be made compatible with bronze-age society. Also, the story itself, as a story, is nicer each time I read it.