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Ideal Age Thresholds for Reading Certain Books


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I was recently talking to a friend about Richard Brautigan, most famous for Trout Fishing in America.  Without really thinking about what I was saying, I said,  "He's the kind of writer you need to explore when you're in your 20s."  I loved his books, but I can't imagine reading one now.  I feel much the same about Tom Robbins. I thought Still Life with Woodpecker was brilliant when I read it age 23 or so, but again, his stuff would not interest me now.    

Am I off-base here?  I think on the one hand, there is something healthy about our perspectives changing as we go through life.  On the other hand, I worry that my brain is becoming calcified for believing that windows for reading certain books will close at key thresholds.  

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I feel fortunate that in 7th grade the class was assigned to read "1984."  It made a deep impression on me, one which informs my viewpoint to this day.

3 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

I was recently talking to a friend about Richard Brautigan, most famous for Trout Fishing in America.  Without really thinking about what I was saying, I said,  "He's the kind of writer you need to explore when you're in your 20s."  I loved his books, but I can't imagine reading one now.  I feel much the same about Tom Robbins. I thought Still Life with Woodpecker was brilliant when I read it age 23 or so, but again, his stuff would not interest me now.

In college in the '70's, I liked both Trout Fishing in America and Robbins's Only Cowgirls Get The Blues.  You might be right that they would appeal to a reader of a certain age, but I might add of a certain time.  Both books are deeply hippy-ish, immersed in that counter-culture, in a way that even a reader in the 1980s would not understand or find appealing.  

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6 minutes ago, mjzee said:

In college in the '70's, I liked both Trout Fishing in America and Robbins's Only Cowgirls Get The Blues.  You might be right that they would appeal to a reader of a certain age, but I might add of a certain time.  Both books are deeply hippy-ish, immersed in that counter-culture, in a way that even a reader in the 1980s would not understand or find appealing.  

I read both authors in the 1980s, although I spent the 1980s trying to relive the 1960s and 70s.  The 80s is by far my most hated decades.

Brautigan was indeed embraced by the counter-culture, but I have read that he didn't really identify with hippies.

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I feel fortunate I read Jorge Luis Borges when I was in high school.  One day during those years, I also watched a live TV interview of Borges - he answered every question with an extraordinary range of anecdotes, stories, humor, observations, etc. - an unforgettable interview.

However, I believe Borges can be read at any age.

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Not in the same way you seem to. I have re-read books I read as a young person and remembered why I loved to escape into their universes, and realized they are cruder entertainment now than they were then--but I still enjoy the re-reading and still enjoy re-reading some. . .authors such as Burroughs, Stout, Moorcock, Collins, A.A. Fair, et al.

Edited by jazzbo
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I started re-read what I could call my personal western canon: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kafka, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Stevenson, Dickens, Mann, Melville, Musil, Simenon, Shakespeare and some more I forgot at the moment, plus some Italian writers. I read all of them in my youth. In general the more I get older better should be the novels. This is the fiction I can read now, that a part I read history. 

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I first read The Grapes of Wrath in my early 20's.  I thought it was good, if not as good as the impressive film version.  The second time was in my early 40's, at which point I regarded it as a definite masterpiece in American literature.  I still love the film, but the novel is a somewhat different beast--and it certainly features Steinbeck at the height of his multiple skills and powers.    

 

 

Edited by Milestones
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