Rereading The Old Favourites

The Guardian newspaper is currently running a series entitled 'Rereading Stephen King', in which the writer and King devotee James Smythe rereads each of King's books in chronological order and discusses the change between his reactions as a teenager and as an adult. Have you ever done this with favourite childhood or teenage books? What was your experience?

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Comments

[Froborr]

I have done this with pretty much EVERYTHING.

My findings:

A.A. Milne: Wonderful as a child, unreadably twee as an adult.
C.S. Lewis: Wonderful as a child, unreadably didactic, mean-spirited, and uneven as an adult.
E. Nesbit: Good as a child, great as an adult.
J.R.R. Tolkien: LoTR and Silmarillion get better with every reading. Hobbit gets worse, so I've stopped rereading it.
Michael Ende: The Neverending Story is the only thing of his I've ever read. I thought it was pretty cool when I was nine. I reread it in my late 20s and realized it was absolute friggin' genius on more levels than I can count.

[textjunkie]

Just did this with the Sherlock Holmes stories. It was like catching up with an old friend.

I did it a few years ago with Interview with a Vampire, though, and that was just painful. Good stuff gets better; other stuff--doesn't.

[picklefactory]

I re-read Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater just last week, and it was just as fantastic as I remember it being when I was little.

[Lonespark]

OMG Whut. I barely remember Lizard Music, but I'm thrilled someone else read it too!

[picklefactory]

I read a stack of his books when I was a kid, and when I just happened across one in Kindle format the other day, well, it was an impulse buy. Great stuff -- he writes like a kid, with a wealth of irrelevant detail that somehow makes his weird motifs more real...

[Ross]

@Froborr: Man, really? I found Winnie-the-Pooh to be way better when I was reading it with a background in philosophy (Also, twee? The most recent time I read it, I was struck by what selfish jerkwads the characters mostly were.)

I haven't reread Lizard Music in years, though I found my copy recently. I should pull it out. I did reread 'The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I mean Noel)' and 'The Westing Game' last year. Neither one was quite as good as I remembered it.

[Izzy]

I would love to read this article as well.

My experience is that McKinley, Cooper, Tolkien, O'Brien, Burnett, and Montgomery hold up basically quite well.*

Lewis sortakinda--I can read most of Narnia without cringing, but I have to make an effort. Mitchell...many bits of Gone With the Wind are goddamn horrifying, but I can appreciate a lot of the psychological tragedy more.

*Although the Anne/Gilbert relationship now bugs me a little. Not so much Anne and Gilbert themselves, but how everyone is all ANNE YOU SHOULD MARRY GILBERT COME ONNNN, and oh my God, the Avonlea Pitchfork Massacre would have happened had I been in her shoes.

[Asha]

I read "The Last Unicorn" as a child, and while I haven't found the book again, I did find a comic version. It had a lot of the weirdness I remember, and I love how it deconstructs and reconstructs the ideal of a fairy tale and never, ever allows you to have suspension of disbelief until it wants you to, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Beagle's language.

[Froborr]

I love Beagle so very much, but I didn't discover him until I was an adult, so...

I was TREMENDOUSLY lucky enough to see him do live commentary at a screening of The Last Unicorn. It was awesome. I've also met and spoken to him a couple of times at cons; he is a really, really cool guy. Just tremendously friendly and clearly loves talking to his fans. (It may help that I pretty much buy his newest book every time I see him. Heh.)

On Milne: I was actually thinking of the two poetry collections. I haven't reread Winnie-the-Pooh since I was a kid.

[Froborr]

Oh man, I forgot Pinkwater!

The Snarkout Boys books were better as a teenager, but still pretty decent. Young Adult Novel is better now than it was then. But the truly special book in my heart is The Big Orange Splotch, which I read when I was four or five and love just as much now as I did then.

Another one that blew my mind as a little kid and I still like a great deal: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris van Allsberg. Good stuff.

[Leum]

I've found Tamora Pierce's Circleverse books improve with age. When I was younger I thought of them as less grown-up than the Tortallverse books. Now I see them as far more subtle and detailed and overall having better characters and worldbuilding.

[The Board Administration Team]

Link to the Guardian series:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/rereading-stephen-king

[gurjeet]

ever allows you to have suspension of disbelief until it wants you to, and I had forgotten how much I enjoyed Beagle's language.

[cjmr]

Of course the characters in Winnie the Pooh are selfish--with the exception of Kanga and Owl they're written as children!

[Timothy (TRiG)]

On my second reading of A Town Like Alice I was horrified that I'd managed to miss the blatant racism in it the first time.

I'm currently rereading The Silmarillion. I'm a bit annoyed that it follows only the royal houses, but it's still well worth reading. (I've just finished the tale of Beren and Luthien, which I know was very important to Tolkien himself.)

TRiG.

[sarah]

I think "Goodnight, Moon" will always, always hold up.

[Amaryllis]

Funny you should ask-- I did a lot of rereading this summer, for some reason.

Ditto to much of what's already been mentioned: Tolkien, Nesbit, Lewis, Montgomery and so on.

@Froborr: The Big Orange Splotch was our Bible when my daughter was young.

Edward Eager: has his blind spots, but I can't help liking his children.

I re-read Ruth Sawyer and Roller Skates: New York in the 1890's is still fun, but for some reason I found Lucinda to be a bit irritating this time around. Or maybe just the author's asides about Lucinda, rather than Lucinda speaking for herself. Also, I was really shocked, as an adult, that none of the adults in the book intervened when the starving musician's four-year-old daughter died for lack of timely medical care. But then, health care is a luxury, not a right-- right, Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan?

Let's see, what else... The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Elinor M. Jewett. God, I adored that book when I was ten: hidden abbey treasures! Old books! Mystic visions! The grave of King Arthur! The Grail itself! Okay, I still think it's all pretty cool.

And, Kate Seredy's The Good Master. Rather over-idealized in its picture of the happy farm on the Hungarian plains, where everyone from the landowner-- the Good Master himself-- to the shepherds and peasants and small farmers-- knows his place and is happy in it. Life on those plains is happily described, though. And the character of the little girl, Kate, holds up surprisingly well. I'd had a vague memory of the book being about a strong-willed, "spoiled," angry little girl being civilized by her uncle, the Good Master. And there's something of that; Kate's temper tantrums are firmly quashed. But her courage and determination and physical energy and intelligence are appreciated and given useful outlets. She's taught to ride, allowed to do anything on the farm that her boy cousin does, takes part in the horse-herding and sheep-herding with him. No one thinks it's strange that she's riding her horse in boys' clothes one day, and getting a pretty dress ready for a holiday on the next.

And Little Women and The Daisy Chain-- now there was an interesting pair of portraits of Victorian girlhood!

[hagsrus]

Many of the A.A. Milne verses hold up well for me, and so does Once Upon a Time (Prince Rabbit).

Lizard Music is new to me, but the library has it for Kindle so I'll give it a go!

E. Nesbit, yes!

One of my favourite series that I've been reading since childhood is Antonia Forest's Marlowe family. Probably a very English taste. I've only ever seen one of her books published in the US, a horribly dumbed-down version of the standalone Thursday Kidnapping.

Alison Uttley...

[Sheila]

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are both on my iPhone and I find them even more deliciously surreal than I did when I first read them. The Wizard of Oz was a touch disappointing, but it's still miles ahead of the movie version, which I still kind of despise for the way it mangled the original story. (Ruby slippers? They were silver, dammit. It was NOT all just a dream. And don't even get me started on "have a little fire, Scarecrow!")

[storiteller]

Unfortunately, I really haven't gone back and reread much even though I've wanted to. There's just too much unread on my bookshelves to get around to re-reading anything. I tried re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia in high school when I was on a C.S. Lewis philosophy kick, but never got all the way through it.

I've been experiencing a little bit of that through my husband though, as he's reading a massive e-book of "classics" right now, including Alice in Wonderland and Anne of Green Gables. It's interesting talking to him about Anne because it was one of my absolute favorite books growing up and it's fun to hear about it from his point of view.