Animal Farm. I got what it was all about the first time but lost all the references to real people.
Not a specific book, but just John Steinbeck in general. When I read him in school, I hated him. He was my prototypical example of how school forces you to read stupid, depressing books, when we could be reading cool stuff like Dragonlance. I felt this way when I read Of Mice and Men in fourth grade. When I read The Pearl and The Red Pony in sixth. When I read Of Mice and Men again my Freshmen year. When I read Cannery Row as a sophmore.
And then, my senior year, we read East of Eden. And that’s all we read: we spent the entire semester on it, and it was the most amazing thing I’d ever read. I couldn’t believe that there could be so much more going on in a book besides just the story and the characters. Since then, I’ve revisited all the other Steinbeck novels that I thought I hated, and realized that they’re all brilliant. Now I’m slowly working my way through the rest of his work. I’m trying to not read more than one Steinbeck book a year, so they’ll last.
That was the first one that popped into my mind. I read it at a very young age (around the same time I was introduced to Charlotte’s Web) and I really liked it, but had virtually no understanding of the background (I knew the animals symbolized communists, but didn’t know what communists were or anything about Russian history). I just saw it as a story showing what happens when people are given power.
I read Huck Finn in the 8th grade, the 11th grade, in college and as an adult, and it was a different book each time.
Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith. I read it for a class in high school and thought that Lewis was condemning Middle America through the eyes of geniuses such as Martin Arrowsmith and Max Gottlieb. 15 years later, I read it and realized that while this attitude was a part of it, Lewis was also subtly condemning Arrowsmith’s and Gottlieb’s attitudes as elitist and condescending, because they didn’t take into account that Middle America supported them in their research while keeping the rain off their backs. They also didn’t realize that successful laboratory and hospital directorship were art forms in themselves, requiring their own brand of genius . . .
Thus, Gottlieb was destroyed by taking on a position for which he was woefully ungifted
Interesting that my high school teacher didn’t catch this one.
Also, the various sciences studied in the book and the demanding pace of research make a lot more sense once one has taken the courses in college himself.