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Just cause you only liked something when you were young doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Everyone talks about the perspective you gain as an adult, but people don’t talk enough about the perspective you lose along the way.
It’s also possible that it’s genuinely good for people of all ages, yet you just obsessed over it in your teens and made yourself sick of it. Like I did with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Which I admit appeals to the cynicism of youth, but it was recommended to me by a 50 year old, it’s not just for teenagers dammit.
I never could finish 1984. I got maybe halfway through it and was like 25% interesting world building, 25% a sad, bitter, sexist person lamenting the way of things (particularly that be can’t just fuck every woman, but also the lying totalitarian goverment) but also having no spine to even consider doing anything about it, and 50% him sneaking around to fuck some horny manic pixie dream girl against the rules. Unfortunately, id have probably enjoyed it more if I had read it at 16
Idk, I likes that part. Ultimately Winston is flawed and weak and yet he thinks he’s making a grand defiant gesture, only to find out the party knew it all. All his secrets and triumphs where plainly and obviously known.
Effectively he builds himself up as a dramatic hero in his mind, and in narrative. The reader gets swept along, but when he falls, when he is crushed, we remember all the gross parts of his personality. We see him as the broken, pathetic man he becomes at the end lf the novel. I enjoyed how the experience of reading the text, and the experience of remembering the text tell two very different stories.
But you see how if they immediately saw the base pathetic person Winston is beyond the curtain of his own narrative, none of that really works.
Then he’s just an audience proxy, reflecting our own patheticness. :)
I’m not saying everyone has to like 1984, I’m not saying there is one concrete experience of it. I’m merely pointing out that unlikable protaganists are a choice, and there can be a strong narrative experience when that choice is made.
A lot of old sci-fi books are like that, interesting world, boring (maybe not the best word for this) story.
Starship troopers. The movie has a story, unlike the book.
Dune. I have read it 6 times.
The first time was rough. When I was 15.
The 6th time was still difficult.
But it fucking does something to my mind every single time
blushes in 4th read through of wheel of time
I’ve read first 6 Dune books when I was a teenager. It had a profound effect on me. I am reading it again, just finished book 4. I think I understand the phylosophical and religious references a bit better, but it’s still a very difficult book series.
Yeah I gotta do my 4th read through og Children, God Emperor, Chapterhouse, and Heretics now. Dune and Dune Messiah weren’t any easier, but dang are they enlightening when you get through it.
Paul’s throne room. Gosh. I hope Villeneuve gets it right in Dune: Part 3.
I wasn’t enjoying Blood Meridian. What life experience do I need to enjoy it?
No, no, you’ve got it right, that is not a book you should enjoy, just understand. If you ever meet someone who got enjoyment out of that book then you need to kill them before they kill you.
There’s also re-reading books you read as a child and going “Oh, this influencing my development makes a lot of sense”
I’m pretty sure either Black Beauty or White Fang turned me into whatever the hell I am now
First time I read Lord of the Rings I believe I was 11. And I hated it. Because I was 11. Also I think it was just the first part, Fellowship . Thankfully I’ve read it maybe half a dozen times since then and I’ve loved it more and more each time and it’s been an entirely different book every single time.
Thanks, maybe I should try again.
I just reread the series a few months ago. Seeing the Shire suddenly jump from a place of ordinary happiness to a place where Frodo has to sneak from place to place, depending on the discretion of his neighbors, hits a lot differently now than it used to…
It’s like reading the bible when you’re an adult and realizing the evil character is God.
The first ever book I read in a foreign language, turned out to be a lot different from what I remembered when I picked it up and re-read it maybe 2 decades later after having mastered that language.
Reverend Insanity.
Reading it now feels slightly like a dnd lonewolf murder-hobo campaign but protagonist is obsessed with telling you he is 500 years old.
Tho I do like the world still.
When I was a kid I absolutely loved the Narnia series, to the extent that I was depressed when I finished the last one. As a young adult I tried to reread the books and was stunned at how heavy handed the Christian propaganda was.
Has anyone watched that Rupert the Bear cartoon recently?
Most racist shit I ever saw. Turns out a vestige of my childhood was Rupert hanging out with his Asian friend Ping Pong and a bunch of long nailed, thin moustached “Chinamen”. Gollywogs level stereotypes and bullshit.
It’s rare to be actually, physically agog.
I remember Rupert the Bear being great when I was a child. Let me pull up some episodes real quick
I think there’s some on YouTube.
And I got the name wrong, it was “Pong Ping” which is somehow worse
We’re the Counting Crows “good”?
Some time a long time ago, I decided to sink my teeth into a nice, long, schlocky sci-fi series. I picked up Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of the Seven Sons. I made it maybe twenty pages in before I decided it really was not for me.
Some time not as long ago, I noticed I had some Kevin J. Anderson books I’d never read. I made it maybe ten pages in before I remembered it really was not for me.
Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” is just bad and I’d like anyone to try and convince me otherwise.
