Re-Reading Books

I’m re-reading Call of the Wild right now. Which got me to thinking about books you read in junior high and high school which made little to no impression on you, and then you went back and re-read them, as an adult, and realized: MAN, these are actually GREAT books!!

One of the main examples of that, for me, is Moby Dick. I had to read it on the summer reading list, and I remember sitting on the beach with my friends, a week before the start of school, reading that damn BORING BOOK – a book that had NO GIRLS IN IT (the woman ladling out chowder in the beginning DOESN’T COUNT) … We speed-read it, over that last week, grumbling, moaning, etc.

I re-read it again in 2000, I think and it is, by far, one of the greatest and weirdest and most exciting books I have ever read.

Another one is Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I KNOW I read the damn thing in high school … but not one word of it stuck with me. It was one big stupid YAWN.

I re-read it 2 years ago, and there were sections of it which brought me to tears. Terrific book.

Any of you care to talk about the books you went back to re-read, only to find that suddenly they were GREAT, as opposed to boring and pointless? (One book I will never go back and re-read is Billy Budd. I just can’t. The first impression it made on me was too horrible. I hated that book. Oh, how I hated it. Perhaps unfairly … I am sure many of you will write and tell me it’s great. But there are some barriers that just cannot be broken.)

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19 Responses to Re-Reading Books

  1. Noggie says:

    Sheila, here is the last line:

    “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.”

    The Red Badge of Courage – by Stephen Crane; it is a terrific book!

  2. corrinne says:

    I had a very similar expericene with “As I Lay Dying.” Totally destroyed my sense of what literature meant in highschool, and by that I mean my teacher talked about symbolism so much I felt like I’d never understand this story (who the hell gets “my mother is a fish” at 15?) Then read it again about a year ago and it completely opened me up to modernism – now I can’t get enough of Auden, Joyce, Elliot, or even Faulkner.

  3. Betsy says:

    Wuthering Heights

  4. Betsy says:

    combined with Kate Bush singing “Heathcliff – – it’s me your Cathy…”

  5. Linus says:

    Ahh…The Scarlet Letter. It’s a terrible infliction in high school, and such a gorgeous piece of work when you come back to it. I didn’t actually remember the opening lines, which I saw in your contest, but felt immediately that they were from the book (I don’t really remember until the bit about the roses, which is further down the page). Powerful writing.

    Now, of course, enough time has passed that I don’t remember a thing about it again.

  6. Dave J says:

    You know, it’s funny, but I enjoyed practically everything I read in high school. That may be just an odd coincidence in terms what was assigned: I don’t think I would’ve liked either Moby Dick or Tess of the D’Urbervilles at that age, but what stands out in my mind is lots of Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain, all of which I devoured.

    Oh, and Vanity Fair, which I remain very fond of, though all the reviews I’ve read of the movie seem to be directed toward getting me NOT to see it: visually amazing, but missing the point, the vicious acid wit of Thackeray’s unflinchingly cynical look at Regency society, which is a real shame since Reese Witherspoon just strikes me as born to play Becky Sharp.

  7. MJF says:

    for me its Shakespeare…Hamlet, Macbeth, Midsummer..etc..we read them as seniors and i didn’t get it..and was frustrated…now they are like amazing passionate puzzles to decifer. Also 1984..i graduated in 1984 and we had to read it..i got it, kinda, but i reread it last fall..wow.

  8. Beth says:

    Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier. ( I hope I haven’t butchered that spelling!! Part of the fallout from teaching 8 year olds- incorrect spelling always LOOKS right to me now!!!) Back to Rebecca- I don’t think it is possible to understand the pain of being SECOND to another woman when you are 16 and just wishing for ANY boyfriend…

  9. BSTommy says:

    I just re-read Lord of the Flies, and was especially happy to see its first line show up in your game this past weekend.

    I buck and drag my feet when made to do anything. So I enjoyed this one very little when I was made to read it.

    It’s really excellent, now that I do it freely. Scary, too, looking into that microcosm.

    I’ve come around to being a huge Faulkner fan. I almost had that obliterated in me when we read the Sound and the Fury my senior year of high school. I hated the shit out of that book, if I may say so, at the time. But I’ve come around….

  10. El Capitan says:

    Let’s see… the “required reading” books from high school….

    9th Grade – Romeo & Juliet and Great Expectations.
    R&J was incredible, the other mind-numbingly dull. I attempted a re-read of GE later, but the the Hawke/Paltrow snoozefest killed that urge forever.

    10th Grade – Julius Caesar & Silas Marner.
    Once again, the Bard knocks one out of the park. I can still quote long passages even *mumblemumble* years later.
    What can be said about Silas Marner? Worst. Book. Ever.

    11th Grade – Of Mice & Men, The Scarlet Letter, Red Badge of Courage, and one semester doing a critical review of Frank Herbert’s Dune quartet (OK that dates me…) A very good year!

    12th Grade – Took creative writing and a grammar course. Read trashy fiction and wrote reams of even more trashy fiction. A better year!

    There were lots of other books, but mostly short and easily digestible for the lowest common denominator that the school was geared to.

  11. K says:

    Ender’s Game – but I loved that one even in high school.

  12. ricki says:

    I actually liked most of the stuff read in high school…coming back to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” as an adult, I saw things in it I didn’t see as a teenager, but I can’t say I liked it better, because when I was 14 I thought it was pretty damned cool to be reading a novel about a guy who turned into a giant beetle…

    I will say two books didn’t stand up so well for me upon re-reading: Catcher in the Rye and Chopin’s “The Awakening.” As an adult, both of them seemed to me to be about such totally self-absorbed protagonists. I think I actually rolled my eyes a couple times over “The Awakening.”

    I haven’t re-read, but want to re-read, The Iliad and the Odyssey. (I even went out and bought the new Fagles translations after reading a review of them).

    Haven’t reread any Shakespeare, outside of the sonnets. Haven’t re-read the Greek plays we had to read (and probably won’t, considering how my reading time goes).

    Have re-read T.S. Eliot’s poetry, still find it fascinating, but am a little abashed to think of what an obvious, self-conscious pseudo-intellectual I was in high school, carrying around a book of his poetry and going on and on about how deep he was. Like, duh.

    Going back a bit further, in 7th grade I had to read Conrad Richter’s “The Light in the Forest.” I complained BITTERLY about the book at the time, how BORING it was, how UNREALISTIC it was. Reread it a few years ago and thought “Why did I hate this? It’s actually a pretty good story.”

  13. Ken Hall says:

    Maybe I’ll have another go at Heart of Darkness. I tried at least twice, and gave up halfway through.

  14. mitch says:

    “Metamorphosis” was a lot more fun in German.

    I’d like to re-read a lot of Dickens today; I sort of liked it then, I have a hunch it’d be much better now.

    I hated “Catcher in the Rye” in high school. I tried to re-read it a few years ago – still hate it.

  15. red says:

    ricki – You are so right on with The Awakening. I rolled my eyes re-reading it too!! I was ready for her to drown herself on the second page and resented how long it took for her to make up her mind.

  16. red says:

    I love A Separate Peace. It’s one of those special books (like Harriet the Spy or Charlotte’s Web or Little Women) that didn’t seem just like a book to me. It has a place in my heart forever.

  17. red says:

    Mitchell – You’ve gotta read the book I just finished – Will in the World – a book that treats Shakespeare’s plays like puzzles to decipher – it’s SO FUN

  18. michael says:

    Hell, I can’t remember anything I read in college, let alone high school. Oh, wait. All that Nietsche, Freud, Hesse, Mann, Norman O. Brown, Camus, Sartre, Kirkegaard, Keroac, Kesey, Ferlingetti. The titles, they all, run, together. The horror. The horror.

  19. Chrees says:

    I wasn’t required to read Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” in high school, but I tried and hated it. While I liked what little bit of Faulkner I had read, I thought this was the over-Faulkner.

    I re-read it and was chilled by it. It troubled me… disturbed me, like no other book has. The personification of pure evil in it left me stunned. I finished re-reading it in August 2001. And not trying to sound melodramatic, but I pulled it back out the evening of September 11th and found it explained what had just happened better than anything I’ve read or seen since.

    It’s not a book for everyone. I can see how it will leave many cold or not care about it. It did me once, too.

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