Daily Reading (09 May 2015)

[nanila]

What have you been reading today? Everything counts, from a novel-length fic to the labels on your washing!

Comments

[weaverbird]

I'd read it before, too, many years ago, when I was too young to get much out of it. For the last year or so I've been revisiting novels I'd read (and disliked) when I was still in school, and it's been very interesting and enlightening.

Perhaps I was an especially contrary child, but being assigned a book to read was all too often the kiss of death - I automatically disliked it. I read voraciously on my own from age 6 onward, but resisted what my teachers handed me. The intervening 45-50 years have worked their usual magic in giving me the necessary perspective with which to appreciate works I had once dismissed as a waste of time.

[ironed_orchid]

Oh yes. The book I read and did not appreciate in high school was Jane Eyre, I expected something more like Wuthering Heights and so I was disappointed.

Then I read it again in my late 20s, and it was a revelation. Interestingly, Wuthering Heights has not stood up to post-adolescent re-readings.

It also took me until late 20s or early 30s to properly appreciate Jane Austen.

[weaverbird]

Oh, thanks for the reminder! Must add Jane Eyre to this list of re-reads. I shan't touch Wuthering Heights, I think. That one I *really* disliked; I could find nothing sympathetic about either Heathcliff or Cathy and therefore saw no romance at all, only misery. Given that, it doesn't surprise me that it didn't stand up for you. *g*

Ahhhhh. Jane Austen! My go-to comfort reading. No matter how many times I read her novels, they never fail to delight. Read them first in my 20s; wonder if they would have clicked with me if I'd read them as a kid? Probably not.