When I was ten, I read a science fiction novel, “Wasp”, written by Eric Frank Russell. I thought it was so exciting and hardly put the book down until I read it all.
About a year ago, I came across the book at a friend’s house. Excited, I asked if I could borrow it because I wanted to read it again! Well, all I can say is that there is a big difference between the reading tastes of a ten year old girl and an adult woman.
Fortunately, though, I didn’t gift it to a dozen people before finding that out. LOL
Me too! Only in my case it was because I misread “tollbooth” as “tollboth” and didn’t know what that was. It made much more sense after my mother explained it was a “tollb’oo’th” (I did know what that was), but by then I’d already finished the book. It made much more sense in retrospect.
Of course, tollbooths are going the way of the dodo in favor of electronic tolling, so future generations may all be very confused by this classic.
I had the opposite experience. I recently reread LOTR, but when I try to go back to The Hobbit, I can’t get past how it’s written down to the audience.
I first encountered the book in a school reader–you know, those collections you got in school that had both short excerpts and short stories? I can’t remember exactly which part it contained–part of me thinks it was just the beginning bit, and part of me seems to remember an illustration of a dodecahedron in the reader.
It’s one of the few where I found the book, and I enjoyed it. I stumbled upon it again in high school and mostly enjoyed it, too, getting a whole lot more of it–especially since I’d by then found out what a tollbooth was.
What I remember now seems pleasant enough: half baked ideas, dodecahedrons, jumping to conclusions, etc. But I don’t remember this political stuff you guys mentioned, so it could bog me down.
I do know one thing from my youth that I adored that I couldn’t make it through as an adult: the Babes In Toyland movie with Drew Barrymore in it. We got it on VHS from the local McDonalds, and I watched it a ton. I kept talking about it as the superior movie to other versions, too, until one day I found it on YouTube and couldn’t sit through more than five minutes. And I’m usually pretty good at putting myself into the mindset of when I was a kid.
Count me as one who read it and loved it as a child. What I most recall is that I read the whole book in one day, which at the time I thought of as some olympian feat.
Dunno what to say. Obviously people’s tastes change over time, but I have gone back to re-read The Phantom Tollbooth and The Lord of the Rings many times in my life - from sixth grade on - and continue to enjoy them just as much. Same thing with Watership Down.
The work that I find un-re-readable that I have re-read enough times at point of my life to be a foundational component of my mental fictionverse is Frank Herbert’s Dune. Mainly because I so very much enjoyed the parody of it, National Lampoon’s Doon, which hit so many perfect notes in skewering to me that I can’t read the original now without considering it very stuffy and self-ponderous, if that is a word. Not Herbert’s fault, of course, but the very epicness of the tone of the dialogue that used to impress me no longer seems poetic, but rather hammy.
I guess a lot of people view LOTR in the same light, the difference to me being the way The Professor adroitly uses archaic English language constructs to indicate the antiquity or gravity of the speakers. Not everybody talks that way, only when Being Really Grand And Ancient And All - it’s key that the hobbits are the main POV characters.
Yes, and oddly enough, the book was The Phantom Tollbooth, which I wasn’t able to slog through when I tried to reread it a couple of years ago. Which is weird, because by and large, I love children’s and young adult literature, and I’ve read (and re-read) a lot of it as an adult and enjoyed it.
I’m responding to someone who enjoyed rereading the Hobbit as an adult, but not LOTR. It would have been nice if I was able to enjoy the Hobbit as much as I did when I was a kid, but I’m not amazed that I can’t, just a little disappointed.
I read The Phantom Tollbooth in fifth grade, and then I did a book report or some sort of project on it, for which I re-drew the map shown in the endpapers.
