I ran across my mother’s university copy of Animal Farm when I was in elementary school. I read it all the way through, but was puzzled along the way about how mean Napoleon was to Snowball, and how could the other animals could let him get away with it.
“Long dark tea-time of the soul”
I got a hardcover version for christmas one year from my parents because I loved the ‘hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’ books so much, and I read through parts of it, including scenes that I vividly remembered into my adulthood - the opening scene in the airport, Kate dreaming of penguins, Dirk remembering that he had a client, buying the I ching calculator and stealing Sally Mills’ coffee mostly.
But I just couldn’t stick with it. I didn’t sympathize at all with Dirk’s character, a lot of the humor was probably going over my head, and I didn’t catch any of the references to the Norse mythology, which might well have hooked me in. I don’t think I got as far as the Wood’s head, and definitely not up to Thor’s big declaration.
Later, after getting the hitchhiker’s books on audio through audible.com, I tried ‘dirk gently’s holistic detective agency’, which I thoroughly loved and gave me a bit of a better rapport with Dirk’s character, even though I sympathized much more with Richard MacDuff and still found Dirk annoying, but in the way you might find an old friend or your brother aggravating. 
Went on to ‘tea time’ on audio, and then I got a paperback copy of the first two dirk books, (since the hardcover copy has long been lost by this point.)
I read much of the Hitchhiker’s Guide series in my young teens, and while I enjoyed it, I missed a lot of the humor. Re-reading the entire series in one go as a thirty-year-old, the whole thing made a lot more sense.
Yeah, well, I was raised Christian by a fanatically devoted C. S. Lewis fan, and I didn’t get them until college, when my Jewish boyfriend pointed it out to me. I’m just not that bright, I guess, or maybe I read them too young and too often–they got so familiar that I didn’t think about them. Yeah, that’s it.
I read 1984 when I was 12–didn’t get it at all.
I hate The Giving Tree too, and want to get the great t-shirt I saw: “The Giving Tree–promoting arborcide and greed since 1964”
I read 1984 long before I learned George Orwell remained a committed Socialist to the end of his too-brief life. That did not in any way alter the book’s clear messages about totalitarian state power, but it did add some poignancy. I also was able to contextualize it better after reading many of his nonfiction essays touching on the “power worship” of contemporary British leftists who sympathized with Stalin and who were able to wrap their minds around every change in Party line even if it flatly contradicted yesterday’s. He described them in one essay as, IIRC, hoping for a future “where the workers are to remain in servitude but the intellectuals are finally to get their hand on the whip.” And his accounts of the Spanish Civil War, and foreign reporting on it, point up why he was so concerned with the danger that the very possiblity of “objective truth” might be dying out in an age when the PTB could rewrite history to suit them.
I sometimes wonder whether The Missing Piece has some message other than the obvious ones – be careful what you wish for, seeking happiness is better than finding it – but to this day I can’t think what it might be.
After we finished The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman my English Novel professor challenged us to re-read it every 5 years and discover a new book every time. He wasn’t kidding.
I’m 63 and still reading books I don’t get. I totally missed the point and the plot of Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. Same with Fools Die by Mario Puzo.
Movies too – mom let me see whatever was playing on Saturday afternoons, and I was very confused by The Man With the Golden Arm. It’s just a normal arm! What’s the deal?
I was pretty old before I picked up on the sexual undercurrents in vampire books and movies. Most metaphors slip right by me.
Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe. I first read it circa 1980 at age 18 while going through some very difficult personal times. I read it as a simple adventure story and promptly forgot it.
Several years later in college, a young lady in one of my classes handed me a copy and said “You need to read this. It’s about you.” I re-read it, and while I’m not sure what parallels she saw between Severian and me, I did pick up more on what Wolfe had to say. I fell in love with the series and it remains my favorite series. I still pick up the books from time to time and find something new with each re-reading.
Part of me believes that all that vampire subtext is just crap made up by the people reading/watching it because they want it to be there.
I remember when John Carpenter’s Vampires came out and a lot of critics talked about the misoginistic and sexual undertones to the movie (and condemned it for them).
But then Roger Ebert (before he went nuts) came out and verbally bitchslapped them all by pointing out that there was no subtext as the main vampire character was a female hooker who was trying to kill the heroes and them attacking made sense because otherwise they would be dead.
Didn’t get On The Road 20 years ago (which, at 32, was rather old to be reading it for the first time, so I’m told). I didn’t get it to the point that I probably won’t try it again for another 20 years.
I have exactly the same problem. Never did see C.S. Lewis’ Aslan as Jesus, nor any Christian link to the stories. Same happens with lots of books and films, so I am constantly shocked when people calmly talk about the ‘obvious’ sub-text. Sometimes I feel so dumb!
Heh. I was introduced to Narnia & C.S. Lewis through my church showing the old animated movie of TLTW&TW, & was explicitly told that it was a Christian allegory before I knew anything else about it.
I’m struck by how much the rest of the series isn’t. I looked for allegory here & there, but I see instead really vividly imagined adventure stories. I got a worldview from them, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not exactly awash in parallels to Biblical tales like I was expecting.
I think maybe Rilian’s enthrallment to the Emerald Witch in The Silver Chair is a metaphor for addictive behavior in general, but I’m as not definite about it, nor am I convinced it’s any one addiction now.
And Aslan is no more a Christ riff than a Krishna riff past the first book.
Maybe that’s the real allegory? Is England closed, exclusivist Xtianity, while Narnia is something else, more syncretic & open?
Go get the new book “Planet Narnia.”
Is it Christian?
Lewis, whose specialty was allegory, insisted that the Narnia books were not allegory. Make of that what you will.
Er. Sort of. It’s a new analysis of the Narnia books–the author believes that he has figured out a whole layer of symbolism, a unifying theme, in the books that no one noticed before. Naturally, one’s first reaction is “yeah, right” --and then you read the book. He convinced me. My mom, the Lewis fanatic, went to a lecture and got a copy hot off the presses, and she’s convinced.
So: yes, the Narnia books are Christian, Aslan is Christ, but the unifying theme is the seven medieval planets. If you’ve ever read “The Discarded Image” you know how much Lewis loved the old medieval cosmology. So he wrote each book with one of the planets as a theme/atmosphere. It all goes back 'round to Christianity, but being Lewis, he uses liberal amounts of pagan themes to do it.
Anyway it all makes a lot more sense now, and I’ve gained a lot of appreciation for the Narnia series. The books aren’t nearly as random as they look. And they aren’t allegories.
Yes - he said something along the lines of, if there were such a world as Narnia, and Christ came to that world, what would it be like? It wasn’t intended to be an allegory of the Incarnation in our world. Some themes get revisited, obviously.
And the Perelandra trilogy is based on the assumption that each world can go either way when Satan shows up to tempt Eve.
But if that’s not allegory, what is?!
Well, if you want to know–in an allegory, to a professor like Lewis (or Tolkein, for that matter), each character represents something abstract. If Narnia was an allegory, Lucy would represent Innocence, Mr. Tumnus would represent Lust, Mrs Beaver would represent Bi-Metallism, and Fenris would represent Fear of Cheese. Or something.
Since there is no neat line-up of characters to abstract concepts, Lewis would say that Narnia is not an allegory. Lewis would reserve “allegory” for a fairly small set of stories, such as Pilgrim’s Progress. None of these stories is particularly popular any more, by the way.