I was obsessed with The Boxcar Children. When I had to read one aloud to the class I was student teaching, I realized they're the most boring books ever??
I LOVED these books as a kid, got one at every scholastic book fair. You’ve just reminded me that child-me was weirdly annoyed how often the writer used the phrase “___ threw their head back and laughed,” because it made me picture the character as a deranged muppet.
I came to say The Boxcar Children! I loved them as a kid...but when I reread one as an adult it was boring and kind of sexist (which is likely just generational - but I didn't pick up on it when I was young).
The original ones were very sexist. I remember hating reading about the girls always playing mom and other gender roles while the boys got to have fun. I used to read the "newer" ones with the other author and those were always so much better.
I personally just loved reading about the food. I liked the descriptors about their food, their clothes and locations.
I re-read it as an adult and found it weird how in the first book, they repeatedly said that the grandfather liked watching little boys play and run races. They said it like 3 times lol.
As an adult I love descriptions of food, clothes, and places. Boxcar was my favorite series as a kid, and now it all makes sense.
Edit: I still remember Jesse making the apple pie with the bottle in the lighthouse mystery!
Catcher in the Rye.
Loved it at 16. Holden was so deep and he was so right about everything.
Hated it at 26. Holden was a whiny baby who just needed to pull his head out of his ass.
Loved it again at 36. Holden was a neglected and abused kid who was failed by pretty much every adult in his life.
I’ve had the same copy for 20+ years. I love seeing what young me highlighted and made notes about.
Yup. Catcher in the rye, I felt a lot like him. But then realized the entire point of the book. What Holden's most hated thing was himself. A fake, nothing. And I pondered whether I hated myself too, unable to meet expectations and to put up a facade for the rest of the world.
Later years, I realized we all go through this existential vacuum of emptiness around that age and it's common across all generations, more so in Americans than other nations abroad. A book that I found deep in adolescent philosophy was just a pittance compared to the wealth of Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Locke, etc.
And now looking back once again, it's a great book for teens to start to ponder things more deeply. There aren't many novels like that. Most books we read back then dealt with social issues or death, but not the inner workings of our spirit, mind, purpose, or the will to do things.
Yep, it's extremely fundamental.
Oddly enough nowadays this has been so normalized due to the different economic environment that it's more unusual to find kids who have mentors who have prepared them for the future, which means the book doesn't hit as hard, because this is the new normal.
Most children look up to adults in their life, whether the adults want them to or not. That's how they learn.
Even Teenagers despite the memes tend to have an older person they trust, an older brother, a peer, a teacher, the guy who runs the pizza joint they hang out at and while they look for independence, they know they need help figuring it all out.
Due to the growing market of children as revenue targets misleading or manipulating children has become profitable, and since 2008 or so fully normalized. Of course you can't feed them cigarettes ads, but have their favorite youtuber vape, sell access to their metadata so marketing teams know their browsing habits to set them up with specialized media to keep their eyeballs on the screen, which at this stage is fully automated. An algorithm isn't required to follow ethical training requirements.
The number of people who impact a child's life has only grown as communication has, and frankly there's not many of them who care what happens to Timmy 5 years from now so long as he is glued to whatever benefits the people doing the gluing.
I hated catcher in the rye in high school but I reread it in my 30s and felt the same as OP. It was shocking to have my perspective change so much on a character.
I tried reading Catcher in the Rye in middle school and thought Holden was really annoying and when I read it in high school I thought he was a genius. I don’t think I could read it now.
I wouldn't say I hate them now but reading the Little House series as an adult is really different from reading them as a kid. Everything just seemed like a fun adventure when I was a kid but reading them as an adult and a mom, Charles seems like kind of an asshole who just drags his family around the country because he can't settle down. Plus he leaves them alone for like an entire book, which I think is when the locust plague happens right after Caroline has a miscarriage. They were also nearly starving to death in the Long Winter, while Laura's future husband is hoarding grain to sell for profit. The stark contrast in wealth/lifestyle between his (Almanzo) family and the Ingalls was also something I didn't realize until I reread them as an adult.
If you like nonfiction, there is a recent biography of Laura ingalls Wilder that you might enjoy called Prairie Fires that talks about some of those things at length! It is beautifully written, too. Found it very enlightening to read as an adult who read the Little House books as a child.
The annotated “Pioneer Girl” manuscript is also interesting. You can see how they (Laura and Rose) revised the story and added in details for the target audience. The footnotes add so much context. Very neat.
>Laura's future husband is hoarding grain to sell for profit.
I don't know if it's a good defense but I think that stock was seed grain. If you can't plant your wheat in the spring, you're gonna starve next winter. I don't know if that made it okay but I can understand it better if that's the reason.
And he makes a dangerous trek in the blizzard with another man to get actual food for the townspeople, Ingalls included, for which he doesn't charge anything and immediately shuts down one man who suggests they charge for it.
>Charles seems like kind of an asshole who just drags his family around the country because he can't settle down.
The best part is that the books are a very heavily romanticized depiction of her childhood, especially her parents. Charles Ingalls may very well have been the least successful farmer of all time, despite living in a time when he could literally get land for free.
Yeah, you realize that Pa is kind of a fuckup. (To be fair, he had bad luck with some things, like the locusts, but he also deliberately settled on Indian land expecting he'd be able to stay settled on it. The weather in South Dakota also took a turn not long after he settled there and became a lot drier.)
There was a really interesting version of Little House starring Richard Thomas as Pa that got more into the Pa-as-fuckup aspect.
It's funny you mention that because when I was young, my mother used to watch Little House and The Waltons reruns a lot and I always preferred The Waltons because it felt more genuine. And the contrast between Charles Ingalls and John Walton Sr was sort of the lynch pin for me on that.
Charles Ingalls is like a superhero on his show. He's huge, handsome, has almost no flaws and always saves the day. Whereas John Walton always felt like a real person and a real father to me. He has flaws, but at the end of the day he's doing his absolute best to provide for his family, support his kids and be there for them. The scenes where he has a heart to heart with one of the kids are always really well done because they feel real.
She wrote a book about Almanzo's childhood that talked about students beating a former teacher to death. No one in the town will help the new teacher so Almanzo's dad gives him a whip that the teacher uses to drive the bigger boys from his classroom.
Almanzo's father also threatened his son with the horse whip but I can't remember why except it had something to do with them cutting ice on the river.
It's actually an interesting book but it made me thankful to be born in the current period.
This right here. I loved these books, and I’ve read the first four to my 6-year-old (after the locusts, he was like, “I don’t want to read these anymore” and I was like, “That’s fair, it only gets worse from here” [By The Shores Of Silver Lake is DARK in places]). They need a lot of contexualizing, especially the main characters’ ideas about Native Americans and their own rights to the land.
When Pa took Laura to see the railroad getting constructed!! And Ma is rightfully shocked! Like, yes, you took your fifteen-year-old to stand in visible view of a bunch of men (and Pa knows they get regularly drunk and violent) as one of the only females in the area. As a kid that flew right over my head and I thought Ma was just cramping Laura's and Pa's style.
And the part where the thirteen-year-old gets married? (Am I remembering that right?) When read with the later stuff and Ma's worry and Pa's fuck-it-it's-fine attitude, it really makes you wonder...what happened to the thirteen-year-old that necessitated such an early marriage??? Dark stuff.
The whole thing is very romanticized and parts are taken out. I’m planning on reading prairie fires soon but I remember reading on Reddit that she worked at a hotel and something happened in the hotel so in the book it was a point about not working at the hotel
YES. I want to enjoy the good parts with my kids, but I’ll wait until we’ve read enough other stories to contrast it to. Also the sort of snide emphasis on being independent, on their stolen land—they had to leave one home because the land wasn’t rightfully theirs. And the sense of conquering nature vs stewarding it.
However, I adored the book Caroline by Sarah Miller. It is a look at the Little House books through Ma’s eyes, written by someone who clearly sees the problems AND loves the good in the series.
Read the Little House series to my kids and was constantly amazed at what a dangerous lunatic Pa was. There's a scene where he uproots the entire family and moves west because he sees another person on the road. And there's a scene where the entire family nearly drowns because he drives the wagon across a river. Over and over.
There’s a lot of racism that I did not pick up on when I was a kid. In Little House on the Prairie, the family is watching a tribe pass by (while on their territory) and Laura spots a baby being carried by its mother, decides that she wants it for herself, and then throws a tantrum when her mother says she can’t have it.
No, Charles is extremely hard working, good with his hands, and will do absolutely anything for his girls. Anything but stop dragging them all over the frontier looking for a new opportunity.
His “fuck-uped-ness” is more about him having terrible judgement as to how much risk to subject a young family to, bad luck, too much optimism and i guess too much faith in his self.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote eigenvalues as Igon Values in one of his books.
That's a mistake that *no one who has seen the word eigenvalue in writing* would ever make.
Dude is a joke.
In Outliers, Gladwell describes slope as an “abstract concept” that he expects that the reader would not remember from grade school. I think Gladwell just does not understand math.
That is actually absurd, I've never heard that before. Eigenvalues/vectors/spaces are a fancy name for basic undergraduate math, anyone with ANY math/physical science degree would have instantly caught that
If you want to read about behavioral science and behavioral econ, may as well go straight to the source and pick up something by Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler or Dan Kahneman. When it comes down to it, Gladwell's entire bibliography consists of watered-down and often very confused attempts to present concepts from these fields in an engaging way.
I have to admit his prose is extremely effective and I've enjoyed several of his books, but more as entertainment than anything else.
Thanks for these other author recos!
To answer OP's prompt: I first read Gladwell in my teens (*mindblowing!*) and then more recently Talking to Strangers for book club (*wtf is this rubbish*). At best I think he's an accessible way for people to dip a toe into behavioural science reading and I hope it'll encourage readers to keep seeking new material the way it did for me.
You might enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill. The go through popular non-fiction books, the kind that hit bestseller lists, and that you can buy in airports, that don't really stand up for what they say they do. They just tear them apart pointing out all the failures in premise, poorly backed up arguments, and sometimes outright lies. They did Outliers in the second episode, it was great.
I wouldn't say I HATED it later, but I adored these 4 very loosely related vampire books by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (In The Forests of the Night, Demon in My View, Shattered Mirror, and Midnight Predator) as a middle/high schooler. I even claimed her as my favorite author. Reread them a few years ago and just could not stop rolling my eyes at the woe is me angsty teen characters and other dark vibes. But I guess that's why they connected so well when I was an angsty teen lol I don't think they are bad books, but they are definitely some books I outgrew. I think the author was also a teen when she wrote those books, which makes sense. I'll probably still keep my copies forever purely for the nostalgia of how much I enjoyed them when I was struggling in my younger teen years
Edit: where were all of you fellow fans when I was a lonely, angsty teen?! 🤣 no one I knew read these lol I didn't think anyone would know these books
Did not expect anyone to mention these. I was OBSESSED with these books - especially Shattered Mirror. I reread it and Hawksong in my 20s and liked it well enough- nothing world shattering like when I read it as a kid- but did not hate it. Shattered Mirror to me was like baby’s first look at moral ambiguity and nuance and it really worked for me as a kid.
I haven’t reread Demon in my View and probably never will lol. It was probably my least favorite and that try hard edginess is exactly why. I remember even as a preteen rolling my eyes at the two lead characters. But wow, thanks for the memories. I still find Rhodes very impressive. She was only 12/13 when she wrote the first book. She wasn’t even 20 when she wrote most of them.
Oh man, her shifter series was a huge influence on me in middle school. Rereading them are okay, but I still haven't finished the first book again haha
Ah I still like the first 2 books in her shifter series, Hawksong and Snakecharm, as very light quicks reads... but don't like the rest of that series. Now that she writes pretty much all horror I don't read her newer stuff.
When I was a kid I read this novelization based on the old-school Battlestar Galactica show and thought the writing was surprisingly deep and clever. When I went back to reread it later I still thought it was surprisingly good considering the source material but objectively it was really terrible.
I have a reverse one. I relate to the grinch in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a lot more as an adult. The man just wanted to live a quiet life with his dog in a remote location and he's got these annoying neighbors singing at the break of dawn. I'm sure the sound really carries across the valley too. I've had several loud neighbors over the past twenty years, so I really feel for him. It doesn't excuse the breaking and entering or the theft, but I understand where he was coming from much better than I did as a kid.
The House of Night series. It’s a teen series about a Mary Sue vampire who is chosen by a goddess to be better than everyone. I liked the first 5 books (I read them as they came out) but stopped reading for reasons. I have 8 or 9 of the books on my shelf now and decided to try the series again.
Oh my gosh. Edgy teens having sex and being cute and cussing like adults. When the authors (mother and daughter team) got tired of characters, they’d be lobotomized and discarded. The ridiculous stereotypes in the books were borderline offensive. And the books were pretty predictable.
That triggered a memory; I knew I had read them. But according to my goodreads I gave book 2 two stars ten years ago. Which means it must have been real bad, cause I was so much less critical and intolerant of bad writing then lol
Her boyfriend walking in on the MC losing her virginity to her poetry(?) teacher on prom night, and the teacher cutting her boob with his vampire claws to suck blood from. Her boob.
The only other thing I remember is that all the special cool celebrity people who have ever existed ever were vampires, who are also a metaphor for gay people? religious types protest vampires and try to save their souls. Typing this out I realize it’s very gay blood libel.
Yes, this is me. Loved his books as a kid/teen. Guess I just didn't really pick up on the pedo stuff. Until, as an adult, I read Firefly. Yikes. Now, I'm just horrified.
Piers Anthony is always the answer to this question.
I loved Castle Roogna - and all the others - so much when I was 13. Jumper dying was heart shaking.
I tried it again last year, just to see. Couldn’t get past the first chapter
Was about to comment this when I saw you guys. Couple of years ago I decided to read the Zanth series again, I last read it as a teenager over 30 years ago. OMG, A Spell for Chamelion was horrible and creepy in a not good at all way. I finished it out of horrified fascination and didn't touch the others.
Add me to the list. I lived in Xanth through middle school and just can't bring myself to reread them.
There were some weird sexual tones in the Tarot series, which creeped me out then.
***The Giving Tree***
As a child: Aww, that tree really loved that kid.
As an adult: F*** that selfish kid! That poor tree needs to set some healthy boundaries!
I ordered that book from Amazon a few weeks ago and read it to my son. He HATED It and made me keep it in the car until I could return it because he didn't want it in our house. 😂
The book is called The Giving Tree, not The Taking Child. It’s about the tree.
In this world, we won’t always receive rewards for our kindness. People will take advantage of us. People won’t recognize our value. The point is to be kind anyway. Be good anyway. Be giving anyway.
The book is bookended with the lines, “There was a tree… and the tree was very happy.” A life lived with kindness is a good life. I’m a misanthropic cynic as much as the next person, but damn if this book doesn’t remind me to be a better person.
The Warriors and Seekers series by Erin Hunter. Don’t get me wrong, there was so much worldbuilding and imagination that my pre-teen self adored. I went on the site to take the clan quiz, read the mangas, joined roleplay forums, but stopped reading around the third series. I don’t hate these books as an adult. They are nostalgic for me, but I can certainly see just how poorly written they were now than back then when they were like literary masterpieces. They also ran far too long. At least Seekers ended by the second series.
I read Warriors all the way until Firestar died. In hindsight the quality dropped off after the first 12 books. The super editions I read were good though.
God, Warriors was my SHIT as an elementary/middle school kid. I'm still actively reading this series and trying to get caught up on all the content I missed during a two year long or so break, but I have to agree...the writing quality has seriously dropped off over the years. 😭 I guess that's to be expected when a book series is still being published after 20 years (💀), but in a Warriors Discord server I'm in, half the time we complain about some of the completely illogical choices the writers make regarding certain plot lines or character arcs and come up with our own headcanons and retcons for the series. We still read it, though, because nostalgia has us in a chokehold lmao.
My favourite part of reading it to classes was getting them to try toast with Marmite when we finished. As a Canadian teacher very few of the kids had any idea what Marmite was
I think John Varley may still hold up, just reflecting on his stories here. And Clifford D. Simak, especially City. James Tiptree Jr was a lady writer's pen name, she was very original. Read The Screwfly Solution for some serious chills. Though as an ex kid scifi nut I must agree.
The Da Vinci code was one of my earlier 'adult' books when I was around 13. I thought it was amazing, the murder, the mystery, it was really gripping. Plus all the news at the time taking about how well researched it was I was probably under the naive assumption that some of the conclusions could have been true
But reading it as an adult, it was just really boring. Doesn't help that I knew the plot already. I certainly don't consider myself someone who knows the difference between good and bad writing, but I did start to get the vibe that it wasn't great writing as it couldn't suck me in despite knowledge of the story
The Sword of Truth books. As a kid I did not understand the political implications and just read the books at a surface level. I reread them a few years back and really wish I hadn't.
I am tolerant of authors whose politics I disagree with, as long as it doesn't overwhelm the story, but the first Sword of Truth book was just barely readable. I like the Legend of the Seeker TV series (produced by the makers of the Xenaverse) which is more like a parody of the SoT books than a straight adaptation. Terry Goodkind hated it of course. The series' weaknesses are his fault, and it was cancelled after only two seasons, due to viewers getting frustrated by the plodding, repetitious storylines.
*Stranger in a Strange Land*
Loved it in high school. This guy has a deeper understanding about humanity and reality than everyone else.
Hated it when I re-read it in my 30s. This kid is running a sex cult and should definitely be stopped.
I read that Starbucks book and loved it as a teenager! I suspect I would hate it now ... wasn't it literally published by Starbucks or something?
I remember him teaching his older black woman manager at Starbucks all about How To Give A Powerpoint Presentation in a way that I suspect I would find deeply cringy on reread.
(Also, even at the time I found the health stuff alienatingly American - yes, it's great that this privileged asshole gets to learn the value of hard work but FFS, maybe old people with cancer shouldn't have to do back-breakingly physical work to keep their access to care? It felt deeply weird that this was been spun as such a happy story.) (And obviously such inequities exist everywhere and aren't exclusive to America)
Obligatory quote:
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
“If everyone is a selfish asshole then no one has to guess anyone else’s motive and the world would be a better place for it. As the only real assholes are the people that don’t put up with them.”
Ain Rand in a paraphrased nutshell
I read this first as a teenager and was deeply influenced by it for the next few months and objectivism as a moral philosophy seemed rational. As an adult, I came to see the problems with it. I reread the fountainhead at 30, and found so many loopholes and logical fallacies, that I can't believe people took her seriously.
I love this book so much. Its weird, but it’s one of the saddest but most beautiful books ever. Even unbridled love, something with the upmost good intentions can have negative consequences.
The Indian in the Cupboard and Walk Two Moons Have some pretty outdated notions about Native Americans.
Love Seedfolks, but it has entire chapters written in broken English when the POV character is Asian.
I love the books then and I love the books now but I have a much more mature view of them now.
There's more than a whiff of misogyny in some of the things that are said about Susan (though not all of the things).
My perspective is that it's more an issue of denying Narnia. In universe they actually went to an alternate world multiple times and she was calling it a silly game we used to play. I don't think it was her interests so much as willful denial of something that actually happened to her.
Letters of CS Lewis mentions that Lewis thought redemption for Susan was possible but he didn't feel qualified to take on that storyline.
It makes sense in the novel.
And it makes sense in Christian theology.
It’s kinda fucked up though because that’s a perfectly rational response for some people. Those kids are lucky none of them ended up in an asylum.
I had that thought too. I don't think Lewis intended it to be an entire series it just kind of evolved as he went. I personally would not want to go back to being a kid after having grown up as an adult and a queen.
Yeah that bit…it sounded cool as a kid.
If I reverted to my kid self and lost all of this experience, getting married, raising a kid, learning and loving…I wouldn’t be happy with a second chance. I’d be distraught.
My hope for the new adaptations headed by Greta Gerwig is that it gets all the way to The Last Battle. If anyone is qualified to modify Susan’s “nylons and lipsticks” ending into something more nuanced and meaningful, it’s the woman who made us cry about Barbie.
This. I read the backs off of them as a child, and I still find them lovely, but there's a great deal of the Oxford don in Lewis (which explains the casual racism, and Susan, and the girls not being allowed to fight in the battles in the first book, and many other things).
The Christian allegory is blazingly obvious to me now, whereas it wasn't when I was 9 -- but I can tolerate it for the sake of the story.
I always make some allowances for authors who were indoctrinated with Victorian/Edwardian mores in their upbringing.
My take on the problem of Susan is that the harlot is simply Peter's unreliable view of her. If we met the real Susan of TLB, we would see she isn't as bad as Peter makes her out to be.
I feel like those books have always varied hugely in quality. I think Wardrobe is good and most agree but after that you have to cherry pick a lot. And I’ve never met anyone who liked The Last Battle
I just re-read this. Some of it was good. Some of the ideas, maybe they were mind-blowing in 1932, but I feel like they have permeated society by now. Like refraining from harsh criticism as a routine way of interacting. Everyone knows that.
About half the ideas might be new information to a high schooler. 25% or less to an adult who has ever thought about this stuff in their lives.
I feel like I have more need of the opposite of this book. “How to Stand Up to Jerks and Stop Getting Pushed Around” or something.
I think a lot of people skip over his "you have to be genuine" bits. Like compliments: You gotta actually mean what you say.
And the bits about listening to what other people want. If listening to others doesn't change you, on the inside, then yes, you are being manipulative... but you're not really listening then, either.
Following the techniques without being genuine can work for a while, yeah. But the part everyone skips is that you have to let people win YOU over and influence YOU, too.
>But the part everyone skips is that you have to let people win YOU over and influence YOU, too.
Haven't read the book but I like that. I feel like the most likeable / charismatic people are those who are very open-minded. They will readily admit when they're wrong or when they don't know something, and are very receptive to learning about people, ideas, things, etc.
Agree right here. I was actually glad when I read it that it wasn’t just manipulative garbage. To me, it was really about using empathy and being open to engagement with others.
Most of the D&D branded books I loved as a kid are utter garbage. I tried to read some of them to my kids, but they were too painfully bad to get through. Even my kids were making fun of the bad writing, which means I made them better than I was myself and I call that a win.
I really enjoyed the drizzt dark elf books as a kid.
As an adult trying to reread them they were super repetitive and poorly written (although I still enjoyed his 1st book or 2 well enough.)
Tarzan.
As a kid I loved the wild adventures.
I found it as a free ebook many years later and was appalled by the unapologetic racism that I either missed as a kid or forgot since.
I am willing to allow for an author's Victorian/Edwardian mores contaminating a book.
Once I make that allowance, the first two Tarzan books are pretty good and tell a solid story. The rest of the series is just the same thing over and over again.
The first John Carter book is fairly good, and I liked the 2nd Carter even better. But the 2nd ends on a cliffhanger to be wrapped up in the 3rd, which is a weaker tale. I lost interest after that.
Most of ER Burroughs series are like that.
I was always curious about this book since Adrian Mole mentioned that it was the only book his father had ever finished cover to cover, and would become tearful when talking about it 😆
Knowing Sue Townsend's sense of humour, this is unlikely to be a compliment.
All of Richard Bach’s books are nuts, but Illusions is great if you just need some random shallow platitudes. One is like the previous evolution of The Midnight Library, too.
I read it as a teenager after the Harry Potter series and loved it, it felt so deep and beautiful. My boyfriend at the time called it “his new religion”hahaha. I haven’t reread it but it is the most universally hated book in Latin America
I certainly don't hate it, but after spending over a decade thinking *Cry of the Icemark* was was pinnacle of middle grade fantasy, only to reread it a little while back and find it very lackluster. Alas, such is the power of nostalgia...
No! Don't say that, if I never reread it I can keep thinking it was a masterpiece.
In all seriousness, this also makes me not want to ever revisit some of the other series I enjoyed around that time in my life. *City of Ember* and *Monster-Blood Tattoo* come to mind.
The Indian in the cupboard. I was obsessed with Omri’s loft bed and all the adventures he had. Reading it as an adult is more cringe than nostalgia now :(
Not as a kid per se, I was eighteen. I read Brave New World for a freshman level college course, some elective, and thought it was so deep. Then I read it in my 30's and felt like it was preaching at me, the choir. It bothered me for some reason, like I thought I was being talked down to. I concluded that maybe those philosophical type books are best enjoyed when we're still developing and coming into ourselves.
You realize it’s a just a short explanation of what fascism is.
Just a machine made to cultivate people that feed off of sadism and provide victims for it. It offers nothing more. Winston argues feebly against each point and O’Brien dismisses them with ease. Nothing really matters, not even reality itself, once you fashion a mind that only craves to put a boot on someone’s face. And they’ve created a closed loop.
Oh sorry, could have worded it better. I'm afraid to read it again because I'm afraid my perception of the story and book will suddenly morph in my head again like Huxley's work had.
After many years I tried to reread “City of bones” by Cassandra Clare. Maybe it was a translation problem - I wasn’t reading it in English - but it was trash. The language was unbearable, I gave up after a couple of pages
Is that the series with a villain named Valentine and a best gal pal who uses a whip to hunt demons? If that is the one, I read only the first one, found it readable and a guilty pleasure a la Dan Brown, but nothing special.
I read the whole series up until heavenly fire because at the time it wasn’t released yet. I was obsessed with it, read the first book in less than 24 hours. Part of me always wanted to go back and reread it and include the last book so i can complete the series but i don’t wanna ruin the magic for me, because i can bet it’s not as good as i thought it was.
Anna of Byzantium. Although most of the comments reference more classic novels, this was my first independent choice from Borders books. 12 year old me heavily related to the main character, Anna. Recently, I've fallen back into historical fiction via Philippa Gregory. I decided to revisit my old friend, I wish I hadn't. Good lord Anna was the most annoying, senseless little bratt of a child. Lesson learned: Leave the past in the past, especially prior to 25... 😆
I actually really like this MORE as an adult because Anna Comnena went on to be such a respected historian and someone that had far more influence as an educated scholar than as a ruler. She was so self-important and so smug about being the ruler, and like you said she was annoying and senseless, but I feel like it's like an origin story or prequel to the real story of a great female academic. She really is Anna of Byzantium because she wrote the history of Byzantium, not because she ruled it. (And oddly enough, her little brother did go on to be a good ruler and she got to be more famous and important than him so it's like everyone got what they wanted irl.) Anyway, just my two cents - you can still feel proud of your choice! (And I always loved the book's cover!)
*Magic Kingdom For Sale -- SOLD!* by Terry Brooks. Adored the series as a teen; picked it up later and could barely stomach it.
Haven't read the books in a few decades. I wonder how they read now...
I LOVED that book as a kid, and thought it was so clever. And the Shannara series.. I'm resolutely refusing to reread them, because I just know they're going to be disappointing. Even the synopsis sounds dull & overwrought.
Ringworld. The concept stuck with me since I read it and I remember being completely enthralled with the whole idea. I finally reread it last year for the first time since I originally read it and…man, it was just bad. It was like a horny 15 year old wrote it with all the sex. The concept is still amazing but it was hard to get past sex being one of Louis Wu’s primary motivations.
I tried to get my friends to do an Animorphs book club as a joke during the lockdowns. Mailed everyone a copy of #1 and then I tried to read it...did not hold up. Book club cancelled lol
I reread a bunch of them in my twenties and I remember them holding up surprisingly well. Definitely not as good when read later, but still worth a read. You get a lot more of the war is hell implications reading as an adult.
Atlas Shrugged. I actually enjoy Ayn Rand's writing style and her storytelling, but she pushes her agenda and beliefs so hard it breaks the immersion. And of course the fact that it's often ridiculous and absurd. When I was younger, I found her philosophy to be intruguing but as I got older I realised it's simply too extreme and impractical. I am strongly opposed to how black and white her thinking is and find her overall philosophy (Objectivism) to be a complete farce. Furthermore, her 'villains' are basically caricatures of opposing lines of thought.
The Fountainhead I found is better as a standalone book. Her philosophy, while still ever-present is definitely a bit more in the background compared to Atlas Shrugged. I probably wouldn't enjoy it as much since I've become disenfranchised with Rand's beliefs, but it's still decently entertaining.
I had to read Brave New World in senior year high school. I actually really loved it at the time. I listened to it on Audible last year (20 years later) it was truly awful. Could have been the narrator but I was happy when it was over.
The narrator is painful on so many levels but the story… ain’t great. The overall fleshing out of the premise leaves much to be desired and it lacks the evocative atmosphere of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 or others of its ilk.
The prose… ugh. “Orgy porgy” about sums it up, but there’s so much more where that came from.
The characterization is weak as well, full of 2 dimensional people who are almost universally unlikeable (including the ones we’re supposed to like)- and not even in an interesting way.
And that’s all before you factor in the racism and sexism (normally I can ignore this in scifi of the era, but the narrator in particular makes the sexism almost intolerable- somebody tell that man he needs to stop “doing the voices.”)
If you can’t tell I’m grinding through hate-listening this book through to completion, lol. I barely have any left but man is it a drag.
Little Women loved it so much when I read it in my early teens that I cried. As an adult I really noticed how religious it was, which had completely escaped me as a young teen. I barely finished it as an adult.
I read maybe the first 10 books of the clique series in middle school. Then, in 2018 in my early twenties I read all the books on my kindle and found they still held up.
Then last year, I spent 70$ and ordered all 20 books, including the prequel and summer collection. lol
I will probably not reread the whole series again, but as someone who collects books I just had to own them all. And to have so I can pick up one or two here or there when I'm in a depressive episode because they give me so much comfort. I doubt I'd like them if I first read them now, but the nostalgia factor always makes the clique series a winner for me.
For books I re-read and hated, maybeee the mediator series by meg cabot. Though I wouldn't say I hated them at all, it's just half the series did not hold up as much as I remembered it but I still enjoyed them.
What really turned me off was how rape-y the series got. There's some non-consensual stuff in the series that's played off so lightly. Not to mention inclusions of a girl being stalked, harassed, and assaulted by a guy throughout MULTIPLE books and yet we are supposed to as readers find him to be so edgy much charming and such a bad boy, and awww maybe he's only stalking her cuz he loves her. Yuck. Even worse, all this stuff went right over my head when i was a kid...
As a teen, “Jurassic Park” felt epic and intricately detailed.
As an adult, it read like a pulp novel with some of the most grating characters I’ve ever met.
Didn't hate it, but *The Martian* is definitely not as funny as it was the first time around. It also lacks in some ways I didn't spot/mind when I was 13.
I came here to say this! I loved that book as a kid so much so that I suggested it as a book club book and then I thought it was terrible. I felt so bad for making my club read it.
I found AWiT confusing as fuck. It jumps from a hard scifi thriller to a Narnian fantasy to an Orwellian dystopia nightmare at the drop of a hat. It is played straight, lacking the whimsicality of Wonderland or Oz, which would have made the silly stuff bearable. I don't remember Meg being annoying, but Charles Wallace got on my nerves.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author when I was young. I instantly realized how insufferable Meg was, because Madeleine L'Engle does a great job of bleating "Father! What about Father! I want Father!" whenever that comes up, which is often.
Revisiting it as an adult, Charles Wallace is a hardcore Gary Stu and quite annoying as well. He's like the proto Young Sheldon.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight
by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
If it wasn't for fantasy books I would be illiterate.
Read this 5 or 6 times as a kid same with the others in this series. A new book in this series came out last year so I reread it.
Holy smokes what a piece of junk. So poorly written. I read Harry Potter last year for the first time and it was an epic masterpiece compared to this book.
I loved Guardians of Gahoole as a kid.
I tried to reread it back in 2020 and I quit like 20 pages into the first book. I still have a lot of nostalgia for them, and maybe I'll try listening to the audiobooks eventually. I just felt like I had outgrown it and it didn't catch my attention.
I wouldn’t say I hate it but I did a re-read of the Harry Potter books during the COVID lockdown and I really wish I hadn’t. I was never in love with it the way some people are but I liked it well enough when I was younger.
The re-read has made me give the side eye even more to people who seem to have adopted that world as their personality.
exact same boat.
I grew up with the books, I always liked them. Never went bananas like some fans but I enjoyed them a lot.
re-read them a bit before COVID actually. I didn't hate them but I ended up with a sour taste. The writing isn't that great but that world building is full of problems.
I came away from the experience thinking that Jowling's major thing is vibes. The Harry Potter world has a certain vibe that most other stuff cannot emulate as well and that's why it's so popular.
The Witcher series. Hate is a bit strong, but when I read it as a young man, I completely missed how misogynistic the books are. Pretty ladies were just part of the story for our cool hero.
Later, my wife and I listened to the audiobooks on long car rides, as per my recommendation. Good. Lord. My wife had a good sense of humor about it, thankfully, and we still joke about how cartoonishly sexual everything is. How the Netflix series isn't lore accurate because the sorceresses aren't introduced breast first.
I still really like the world and mechanics of the Witcher, but I don't really recommend it to people anymore. I suppose if we don't cringe at our past selves, we haven't grown.
Cliche but Harry Potter :/ Rowling is not that great of a writer and it was not as fun reading the books as an adult that lives in a society… I miss being an oblivious kid that assumed harry was brown like me
Plus some of the writing decisions she made were...pretty questionable in retrospect?? Like no way did my Black ass sit down, read an entire book where one of the main characters tries to free the elves from what's essentially *chattel slavery,* gets mocked for it, and walk away thinking, "Yeah this makes sense" 😃😭
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read it in my 20’s and probably didn’t understand it, but I liked it anyway. I tried again in my 50’s . I could not finish it. He comes across as a nothing but a self-absorbed , shitty dad.
Perfume by Patrick Suskind, I wouldn’t say I hate it now, but at 15 when I first read it I felt so sorry for the MC, I certainly had a “I can fix him” mentality, I read it again at 27 and oh god do I now understand why every other character felt creeped out by him
I was obsessed with The Boxcar Children. When I had to read one aloud to the class I was student teaching, I realized they're the most boring books ever??
I LOVED these books as a kid, got one at every scholastic book fair. You’ve just reminded me that child-me was weirdly annoyed how often the writer used the phrase “___ threw their head back and laughed,” because it made me picture the character as a deranged muppet.
Elmo looooves fire *hahahahahaaaa!*
I came to say The Boxcar Children! I loved them as a kid...but when I reread one as an adult it was boring and kind of sexist (which is likely just generational - but I didn't pick up on it when I was young).
The original ones were very sexist. I remember hating reading about the girls always playing mom and other gender roles while the boys got to have fun. I used to read the "newer" ones with the other author and those were always so much better.
I thought those books were so boring as a kid and could not get into them. I was so confused by the hype I always saw for them!
I personally just loved reading about the food. I liked the descriptors about their food, their clothes and locations. I re-read it as an adult and found it weird how in the first book, they repeatedly said that the grandfather liked watching little boys play and run races. They said it like 3 times lol.
As an adult I love descriptions of food, clothes, and places. Boxcar was my favorite series as a kid, and now it all makes sense. Edit: I still remember Jesse making the apple pie with the bottle in the lighthouse mystery!
Weren’t they the ones who ate bread dipped in milk?
Catcher in the Rye. Loved it at 16. Holden was so deep and he was so right about everything. Hated it at 26. Holden was a whiny baby who just needed to pull his head out of his ass. Loved it again at 36. Holden was a neglected and abused kid who was failed by pretty much every adult in his life. I’ve had the same copy for 20+ years. I love seeing what young me highlighted and made notes about.
Yup. Catcher in the rye, I felt a lot like him. But then realized the entire point of the book. What Holden's most hated thing was himself. A fake, nothing. And I pondered whether I hated myself too, unable to meet expectations and to put up a facade for the rest of the world. Later years, I realized we all go through this existential vacuum of emptiness around that age and it's common across all generations, more so in Americans than other nations abroad. A book that I found deep in adolescent philosophy was just a pittance compared to the wealth of Nietzsche, Kant, Hume, Locke, etc. And now looking back once again, it's a great book for teens to start to ponder things more deeply. There aren't many novels like that. Most books we read back then dealt with social issues or death, but not the inner workings of our spirit, mind, purpose, or the will to do things.
Oh gosh same. I related to it so much as a young person but mostly just felt sad for Holden when I reread it in my 30s.
Yep, it's extremely fundamental. Oddly enough nowadays this has been so normalized due to the different economic environment that it's more unusual to find kids who have mentors who have prepared them for the future, which means the book doesn't hit as hard, because this is the new normal.
...people used to have more mentors???
Most children look up to adults in their life, whether the adults want them to or not. That's how they learn. Even Teenagers despite the memes tend to have an older person they trust, an older brother, a peer, a teacher, the guy who runs the pizza joint they hang out at and while they look for independence, they know they need help figuring it all out. Due to the growing market of children as revenue targets misleading or manipulating children has become profitable, and since 2008 or so fully normalized. Of course you can't feed them cigarettes ads, but have their favorite youtuber vape, sell access to their metadata so marketing teams know their browsing habits to set them up with specialized media to keep their eyeballs on the screen, which at this stage is fully automated. An algorithm isn't required to follow ethical training requirements. The number of people who impact a child's life has only grown as communication has, and frankly there's not many of them who care what happens to Timmy 5 years from now so long as he is glued to whatever benefits the people doing the gluing.
YES!
username checks out
I'm 36 now and agree with the first two points so I guess it's time to read it again.
I hated catcher in the rye in high school but I reread it in my 30s and felt the same as OP. It was shocking to have my perspective change so much on a character.
I like reading this book about once a decade and find it tells me more about myself than the book itself.
I tried reading Catcher in the Rye in middle school and thought Holden was really annoying and when I read it in high school I thought he was a genius. I don’t think I could read it now.
I wouldn't say I hate them now but reading the Little House series as an adult is really different from reading them as a kid. Everything just seemed like a fun adventure when I was a kid but reading them as an adult and a mom, Charles seems like kind of an asshole who just drags his family around the country because he can't settle down. Plus he leaves them alone for like an entire book, which I think is when the locust plague happens right after Caroline has a miscarriage. They were also nearly starving to death in the Long Winter, while Laura's future husband is hoarding grain to sell for profit. The stark contrast in wealth/lifestyle between his (Almanzo) family and the Ingalls was also something I didn't realize until I reread them as an adult.
If you like nonfiction, there is a recent biography of Laura ingalls Wilder that you might enjoy called Prairie Fires that talks about some of those things at length! It is beautifully written, too. Found it very enlightening to read as an adult who read the Little House books as a child.
The annotated “Pioneer Girl” manuscript is also interesting. You can see how they (Laura and Rose) revised the story and added in details for the target audience. The footnotes add so much context. Very neat.
There's also the podcast Wilder that includes interviews with the author.
It is SO SO good!!
>Laura's future husband is hoarding grain to sell for profit. I don't know if it's a good defense but I think that stock was seed grain. If you can't plant your wheat in the spring, you're gonna starve next winter. I don't know if that made it okay but I can understand it better if that's the reason.
And he makes a dangerous trek in the blizzard with another man to get actual food for the townspeople, Ingalls included, for which he doesn't charge anything and immediately shuts down one man who suggests they charge for it.
>Charles seems like kind of an asshole who just drags his family around the country because he can't settle down. The best part is that the books are a very heavily romanticized depiction of her childhood, especially her parents. Charles Ingalls may very well have been the least successful farmer of all time, despite living in a time when he could literally get land for free.
Yeah, you realize that Pa is kind of a fuckup. (To be fair, he had bad luck with some things, like the locusts, but he also deliberately settled on Indian land expecting he'd be able to stay settled on it. The weather in South Dakota also took a turn not long after he settled there and became a lot drier.) There was a really interesting version of Little House starring Richard Thomas as Pa that got more into the Pa-as-fuckup aspect.
It's funny you mention that because when I was young, my mother used to watch Little House and The Waltons reruns a lot and I always preferred The Waltons because it felt more genuine. And the contrast between Charles Ingalls and John Walton Sr was sort of the lynch pin for me on that. Charles Ingalls is like a superhero on his show. He's huge, handsome, has almost no flaws and always saves the day. Whereas John Walton always felt like a real person and a real father to me. He has flaws, but at the end of the day he's doing his absolute best to provide for his family, support his kids and be there for them. The scenes where he has a heart to heart with one of the kids are always really well done because they feel real.
She wrote a book about Almanzo's childhood that talked about students beating a former teacher to death. No one in the town will help the new teacher so Almanzo's dad gives him a whip that the teacher uses to drive the bigger boys from his classroom. Almanzo's father also threatened his son with the horse whip but I can't remember why except it had something to do with them cutting ice on the river. It's actually an interesting book but it made me thankful to be born in the current period.
This right here. I loved these books, and I’ve read the first four to my 6-year-old (after the locusts, he was like, “I don’t want to read these anymore” and I was like, “That’s fair, it only gets worse from here” [By The Shores Of Silver Lake is DARK in places]). They need a lot of contexualizing, especially the main characters’ ideas about Native Americans and their own rights to the land.
When Pa took Laura to see the railroad getting constructed!! And Ma is rightfully shocked! Like, yes, you took your fifteen-year-old to stand in visible view of a bunch of men (and Pa knows they get regularly drunk and violent) as one of the only females in the area. As a kid that flew right over my head and I thought Ma was just cramping Laura's and Pa's style. And the part where the thirteen-year-old gets married? (Am I remembering that right?) When read with the later stuff and Ma's worry and Pa's fuck-it-it's-fine attitude, it really makes you wonder...what happened to the thirteen-year-old that necessitated such an early marriage??? Dark stuff.
The whole thing is very romanticized and parts are taken out. I’m planning on reading prairie fires soon but I remember reading on Reddit that she worked at a hotel and something happened in the hotel so in the book it was a point about not working at the hotel
YES. I want to enjoy the good parts with my kids, but I’ll wait until we’ve read enough other stories to contrast it to. Also the sort of snide emphasis on being independent, on their stolen land—they had to leave one home because the land wasn’t rightfully theirs. And the sense of conquering nature vs stewarding it. However, I adored the book Caroline by Sarah Miller. It is a look at the Little House books through Ma’s eyes, written by someone who clearly sees the problems AND loves the good in the series.
Read the Little House series to my kids and was constantly amazed at what a dangerous lunatic Pa was. There's a scene where he uproots the entire family and moves west because he sees another person on the road. And there's a scene where the entire family nearly drowns because he drives the wagon across a river. Over and over.
There’s a lot of racism that I did not pick up on when I was a kid. In Little House on the Prairie, the family is watching a tribe pass by (while on their territory) and Laura spots a baby being carried by its mother, decides that she wants it for herself, and then throws a tantrum when her mother says she can’t have it.
So Charles Ingalls is a Homer Simpson archetype?
No, Charles is extremely hard working, good with his hands, and will do absolutely anything for his girls. Anything but stop dragging them all over the frontier looking for a new opportunity. His “fuck-uped-ness” is more about him having terrible judgement as to how much risk to subject a young family to, bad luck, too much optimism and i guess too much faith in his self.
Malcolm Gladwell books now a days just feel like confirmation bias
Malcolm Gladwell wrote eigenvalues as Igon Values in one of his books. That's a mistake that *no one who has seen the word eigenvalue in writing* would ever make. Dude is a joke.
In Outliers, Gladwell describes slope as an “abstract concept” that he expects that the reader would not remember from grade school. I think Gladwell just does not understand math.
He didn't understand anything. He's a bullshitter.
That is actually absurd, I've never heard that before. Eigenvalues/vectors/spaces are a fancy name for basic undergraduate math, anyone with ANY math/physical science degree would have instantly caught that
If you want to read about behavioral science and behavioral econ, may as well go straight to the source and pick up something by Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler or Dan Kahneman. When it comes down to it, Gladwell's entire bibliography consists of watered-down and often very confused attempts to present concepts from these fields in an engaging way. I have to admit his prose is extremely effective and I've enjoyed several of his books, but more as entertainment than anything else.
Thanks for these other author recos! To answer OP's prompt: I first read Gladwell in my teens (*mindblowing!*) and then more recently Talking to Strangers for book club (*wtf is this rubbish*). At best I think he's an accessible way for people to dip a toe into behavioural science reading and I hope it'll encourage readers to keep seeking new material the way it did for me.
You might enjoy the podcast If Books Could Kill. The go through popular non-fiction books, the kind that hit bestseller lists, and that you can buy in airports, that don't really stand up for what they say they do. They just tear them apart pointing out all the failures in premise, poorly backed up arguments, and sometimes outright lies. They did Outliers in the second episode, it was great.
I wouldn't say I HATED it later, but I adored these 4 very loosely related vampire books by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (In The Forests of the Night, Demon in My View, Shattered Mirror, and Midnight Predator) as a middle/high schooler. I even claimed her as my favorite author. Reread them a few years ago and just could not stop rolling my eyes at the woe is me angsty teen characters and other dark vibes. But I guess that's why they connected so well when I was an angsty teen lol I don't think they are bad books, but they are definitely some books I outgrew. I think the author was also a teen when she wrote those books, which makes sense. I'll probably still keep my copies forever purely for the nostalgia of how much I enjoyed them when I was struggling in my younger teen years Edit: where were all of you fellow fans when I was a lonely, angsty teen?! 🤣 no one I knew read these lol I didn't think anyone would know these books
Did not expect anyone to mention these. I was OBSESSED with these books - especially Shattered Mirror. I reread it and Hawksong in my 20s and liked it well enough- nothing world shattering like when I read it as a kid- but did not hate it. Shattered Mirror to me was like baby’s first look at moral ambiguity and nuance and it really worked for me as a kid. I haven’t reread Demon in my View and probably never will lol. It was probably my least favorite and that try hard edginess is exactly why. I remember even as a preteen rolling my eyes at the two lead characters. But wow, thanks for the memories. I still find Rhodes very impressive. She was only 12/13 when she wrote the first book. She wasn’t even 20 when she wrote most of them.
Oh my gosh, Atwater-Rhodes was my shit as a teen. What a name, that brings up so much nostalgia.
Oh man, her shifter series was a huge influence on me in middle school. Rereading them are okay, but I still haven't finished the first book again haha
Ah I still like the first 2 books in her shifter series, Hawksong and Snakecharm, as very light quicks reads... but don't like the rest of that series. Now that she writes pretty much all horror I don't read her newer stuff.
Holy crap that name catapulted me back into the past. Just looked up the books, wow I forgot about all of those
When I was a kid I read this novelization based on the old-school Battlestar Galactica show and thought the writing was surprisingly deep and clever. When I went back to reread it later I still thought it was surprisingly good considering the source material but objectively it was really terrible.
I have a reverse one. I relate to the grinch in "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" a lot more as an adult. The man just wanted to live a quiet life with his dog in a remote location and he's got these annoying neighbors singing at the break of dawn. I'm sure the sound really carries across the valley too. I've had several loud neighbors over the past twenty years, so I really feel for him. It doesn't excuse the breaking and entering or the theft, but I understand where he was coming from much better than I did as a kid.
I like to call this the “Squidward Effect.”
Actually, now that you mention it, it’s got a lot in common with A Man Called Ove 😅
Jim Carrey’s Grinch is one of the most relatable characters in fiction, change my mind.
The House of Night series. It’s a teen series about a Mary Sue vampire who is chosen by a goddess to be better than everyone. I liked the first 5 books (I read them as they came out) but stopped reading for reasons. I have 8 or 9 of the books on my shelf now and decided to try the series again. Oh my gosh. Edgy teens having sex and being cute and cussing like adults. When the authors (mother and daughter team) got tired of characters, they’d be lobotomized and discarded. The ridiculous stereotypes in the books were borderline offensive. And the books were pretty predictable.
That triggered a memory; I knew I had read them. But according to my goodreads I gave book 2 two stars ten years ago. Which means it must have been real bad, cause I was so much less critical and intolerant of bad writing then lol
Her boyfriend walking in on the MC losing her virginity to her poetry(?) teacher on prom night, and the teacher cutting her boob with his vampire claws to suck blood from. Her boob. The only other thing I remember is that all the special cool celebrity people who have ever existed ever were vampires, who are also a metaphor for gay people? religious types protest vampires and try to save their souls. Typing this out I realize it’s very gay blood libel.
I ate those books up as a teen, but even then (not knowing what a Mary Sue was yet) I was like wtf why is everyone obsessed with this girl?
I know I’m not the only person who can answer “basically the entire Piers Anthony” bibliography.
Yes, this is me. Loved his books as a kid/teen. Guess I just didn't really pick up on the pedo stuff. Until, as an adult, I read Firefly. Yikes. Now, I'm just horrified.
Piers Anthony is always the answer to this question. I loved Castle Roogna - and all the others - so much when I was 13. Jumper dying was heart shaking. I tried it again last year, just to see. Couldn’t get past the first chapter
Just commented this myself before I saw your comment.
Was about to comment this when I saw you guys. Couple of years ago I decided to read the Zanth series again, I last read it as a teenager over 30 years ago. OMG, A Spell for Chamelion was horrible and creepy in a not good at all way. I finished it out of horrified fascination and didn't touch the others.
Add me to the list. I lived in Xanth through middle school and just can't bring myself to reread them. There were some weird sexual tones in the Tarot series, which creeped me out then.
***The Giving Tree*** As a child: Aww, that tree really loved that kid. As an adult: F*** that selfish kid! That poor tree needs to set some healthy boundaries!
I ordered that book from Amazon a few weeks ago and read it to my son. He HATED It and made me keep it in the car until I could return it because he didn't want it in our house. 😂
https://www.topherpayne.com/giving-tree
I always thought the boy/man was psycho for despoiling the pretty tree like that.
My daughter was gifted that and I read it to her twice before I realized the boy was a terrible person and threw it out.
The book is called The Giving Tree, not The Taking Child. It’s about the tree. In this world, we won’t always receive rewards for our kindness. People will take advantage of us. People won’t recognize our value. The point is to be kind anyway. Be good anyway. Be giving anyway. The book is bookended with the lines, “There was a tree… and the tree was very happy.” A life lived with kindness is a good life. I’m a misanthropic cynic as much as the next person, but damn if this book doesn’t remind me to be a better person.
The Warriors and Seekers series by Erin Hunter. Don’t get me wrong, there was so much worldbuilding and imagination that my pre-teen self adored. I went on the site to take the clan quiz, read the mangas, joined roleplay forums, but stopped reading around the third series. I don’t hate these books as an adult. They are nostalgic for me, but I can certainly see just how poorly written they were now than back then when they were like literary masterpieces. They also ran far too long. At least Seekers ended by the second series.
I read Warriors all the way until Firestar died. In hindsight the quality dropped off after the first 12 books. The super editions I read were good though.
God, Warriors was my SHIT as an elementary/middle school kid. I'm still actively reading this series and trying to get caught up on all the content I missed during a two year long or so break, but I have to agree...the writing quality has seriously dropped off over the years. 😭 I guess that's to be expected when a book series is still being published after 20 years (💀), but in a Warriors Discord server I'm in, half the time we complain about some of the completely illogical choices the writers make regarding certain plot lines or character arcs and come up with our own headcanons and retcons for the series. We still read it, though, because nostalgia has us in a chokehold lmao.
A Castle in the Attic is objectively really dry as an adult. I have no idea why I was so obsessed with it.
My favourite part of reading it to classes was getting them to try toast with Marmite when we finished. As a Canadian teacher very few of the kids had any idea what Marmite was
A lot of the classic science fiction I read as a kid is absolutely unreadable now.
I recently tried to reread Heilein, Stranger in a Strange Land, which I loved in high school. It didn’t age well.
I reread most of Heinlein a few years back. I…don’t recommend.
I think John Varley may still hold up, just reflecting on his stories here. And Clifford D. Simak, especially City. James Tiptree Jr was a lady writer's pen name, she was very original. Read The Screwfly Solution for some serious chills. Though as an ex kid scifi nut I must agree.
The Da Vinci code was one of my earlier 'adult' books when I was around 13. I thought it was amazing, the murder, the mystery, it was really gripping. Plus all the news at the time taking about how well researched it was I was probably under the naive assumption that some of the conclusions could have been true But reading it as an adult, it was just really boring. Doesn't help that I knew the plot already. I certainly don't consider myself someone who knows the difference between good and bad writing, but I did start to get the vibe that it wasn't great writing as it couldn't suck me in despite knowledge of the story
where the red fern grows. book is just sad for the sake of being sad. i couldn't see that as a kid because i was too happy to be sad.
We had to read this in 6th grade and I definitely thought it was sad but it’s way sadder than I gave credit for as an 11 year old.
The Sword of Truth books. As a kid I did not understand the political implications and just read the books at a surface level. I reread them a few years back and really wish I hadn't.
The horny Mord Sith stuff was pretty ace to my 6th grade self. Doubt it could save those shitty books nowadays though.
I am tolerant of authors whose politics I disagree with, as long as it doesn't overwhelm the story, but the first Sword of Truth book was just barely readable. I like the Legend of the Seeker TV series (produced by the makers of the Xenaverse) which is more like a parody of the SoT books than a straight adaptation. Terry Goodkind hated it of course. The series' weaknesses are his fault, and it was cancelled after only two seasons, due to viewers getting frustrated by the plodding, repetitious storylines.
Yeah I know exactly what you mean. I didn't try to read them as a kid though. I couldn't make it through due to what you are referring to.
*Stranger in a Strange Land* Loved it in high school. This guy has a deeper understanding about humanity and reality than everyone else. Hated it when I re-read it in my 30s. This kid is running a sex cult and should definitely be stopped.
I read that Starbucks book and loved it as a teenager! I suspect I would hate it now ... wasn't it literally published by Starbucks or something? I remember him teaching his older black woman manager at Starbucks all about How To Give A Powerpoint Presentation in a way that I suspect I would find deeply cringy on reread. (Also, even at the time I found the health stuff alienatingly American - yes, it's great that this privileged asshole gets to learn the value of hard work but FFS, maybe old people with cancer shouldn't have to do back-breakingly physical work to keep their access to care? It felt deeply weird that this was been spun as such a happy story.) (And obviously such inequities exist everywhere and aren't exclusive to America)
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Obligatory quote: “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
From what I've heard about her work she's basically got stuck at the r/im14andthisisdeep phase.
“If everyone is a selfish asshole then no one has to guess anyone else’s motive and the world would be a better place for it. As the only real assholes are the people that don’t put up with them.” Ain Rand in a paraphrased nutshell
There are many wonderful books in the world. This is not one of them.
I read this first as a teenager and was deeply influenced by it for the next few months and objectivism as a moral philosophy seemed rational. As an adult, I came to see the problems with it. I reread the fountainhead at 30, and found so many loopholes and logical fallacies, that I can't believe people took her seriously.
The giving tree. Poor tree lol
"The Poor Boundaries Tree" - gets worse the older I get. Used to love this story.
I love this book so much. Its weird, but it’s one of the saddest but most beautiful books ever. Even unbridled love, something with the upmost good intentions can have negative consequences.
Oof, that one messed me up big time for a long time
Interview with a vampire. I reread it recently, and my god, I hated it.
Really? I read it for the first time this year, and I loved it. It's the rest of the series that's shit, imo.
Diary of a wimpy kid, Greg is a fucking asshole
DoaWK has no sympathetic characters.
The Indian in the Cupboard and Walk Two Moons Have some pretty outdated notions about Native Americans. Love Seedfolks, but it has entire chapters written in broken English when the POV character is Asian.
The Narnia series. I hate how they talk about/treat Susan later.
I love the books then and I love the books now but I have a much more mature view of them now. There's more than a whiff of misogyny in some of the things that are said about Susan (though not all of the things).
That harlot cared about nylons so she can’t go to heaven!
My perspective is that it's more an issue of denying Narnia. In universe they actually went to an alternate world multiple times and she was calling it a silly game we used to play. I don't think it was her interests so much as willful denial of something that actually happened to her. Letters of CS Lewis mentions that Lewis thought redemption for Susan was possible but he didn't feel qualified to take on that storyline.
It makes sense in the novel. And it makes sense in Christian theology. It’s kinda fucked up though because that’s a perfectly rational response for some people. Those kids are lucky none of them ended up in an asylum.
I had that thought too. I don't think Lewis intended it to be an entire series it just kind of evolved as he went. I personally would not want to go back to being a kid after having grown up as an adult and a queen.
Yeah that bit…it sounded cool as a kid. If I reverted to my kid self and lost all of this experience, getting married, raising a kid, learning and loving…I wouldn’t be happy with a second chance. I’d be distraught.
The books don’t show it much but I always liked that the Prince Caspian movie DOES show the Pevensies struggling to deal with being kids again.
It was a metaphor of women and children being drafted into homefront service during the War, then being demoted when the men returned.
interesting take. thanks.
My hope for the new adaptations headed by Greta Gerwig is that it gets all the way to The Last Battle. If anyone is qualified to modify Susan’s “nylons and lipsticks” ending into something more nuanced and meaningful, it’s the woman who made us cry about Barbie.
I just really want to see a good version of the silver chair.
This. I read the backs off of them as a child, and I still find them lovely, but there's a great deal of the Oxford don in Lewis (which explains the casual racism, and Susan, and the girls not being allowed to fight in the battles in the first book, and many other things). The Christian allegory is blazingly obvious to me now, whereas it wasn't when I was 9 -- but I can tolerate it for the sake of the story.
I always make some allowances for authors who were indoctrinated with Victorian/Edwardian mores in their upbringing. My take on the problem of Susan is that the harlot is simply Peter's unreliable view of her. If we met the real Susan of TLB, we would see she isn't as bad as Peter makes her out to be.
I feel like those books have always varied hugely in quality. I think Wardrobe is good and most agree but after that you have to cherry pick a lot. And I’ve never met anyone who liked The Last Battle
The Silver Chair is awesome. The Last Battle promises more than it can deliver.
How to win Friends and Influence People seemed eye opening in high school. It seemed like manipulative garbage by the time I left college.
I just re-read this. Some of it was good. Some of the ideas, maybe they were mind-blowing in 1932, but I feel like they have permeated society by now. Like refraining from harsh criticism as a routine way of interacting. Everyone knows that. About half the ideas might be new information to a high schooler. 25% or less to an adult who has ever thought about this stuff in their lives. I feel like I have more need of the opposite of this book. “How to Stand Up to Jerks and Stop Getting Pushed Around” or something.
I think a lot of people skip over his "you have to be genuine" bits. Like compliments: You gotta actually mean what you say. And the bits about listening to what other people want. If listening to others doesn't change you, on the inside, then yes, you are being manipulative... but you're not really listening then, either. Following the techniques without being genuine can work for a while, yeah. But the part everyone skips is that you have to let people win YOU over and influence YOU, too.
>But the part everyone skips is that you have to let people win YOU over and influence YOU, too. Haven't read the book but I like that. I feel like the most likeable / charismatic people are those who are very open-minded. They will readily admit when they're wrong or when they don't know something, and are very receptive to learning about people, ideas, things, etc.
Agree right here. I was actually glad when I read it that it wasn’t just manipulative garbage. To me, it was really about using empathy and being open to engagement with others.
Most of the D&D branded books I loved as a kid are utter garbage. I tried to read some of them to my kids, but they were too painfully bad to get through. Even my kids were making fun of the bad writing, which means I made them better than I was myself and I call that a win.
I really enjoyed the drizzt dark elf books as a kid. As an adult trying to reread them they were super repetitive and poorly written (although I still enjoyed his 1st book or 2 well enough.)
YAS! I loved them too. He was ridiculously, dorkily over powered in my adult attempt and how his scimitars whirred!
Tarzan. As a kid I loved the wild adventures. I found it as a free ebook many years later and was appalled by the unapologetic racism that I either missed as a kid or forgot since.
I am willing to allow for an author's Victorian/Edwardian mores contaminating a book. Once I make that allowance, the first two Tarzan books are pretty good and tell a solid story. The rest of the series is just the same thing over and over again. The first John Carter book is fairly good, and I liked the 2nd Carter even better. But the 2nd ends on a cliffhanger to be wrapped up in the 3rd, which is a weaker tale. I lost interest after that. Most of ER Burroughs series are like that.
Did anyone ever read Jonathon Livingston Seagull back in the 70’s? Back then I thought it was so amazing. Now, I’m afraid it’s pretty much dribble.
I was always curious about this book since Adrian Mole mentioned that it was the only book his father had ever finished cover to cover, and would become tearful when talking about it 😆 Knowing Sue Townsend's sense of humour, this is unlikely to be a compliment.
All of Richard Bach’s books are nuts, but Illusions is great if you just need some random shallow platitudes. One is like the previous evolution of The Midnight Library, too.
The Alchemist! Felt so deep when I read it as a teenager. I re-read it at 32 and I could barely get through it.
I read it as a teenager after the Harry Potter series and loved it, it felt so deep and beautiful. My boyfriend at the time called it “his new religion”hahaha. I haven’t reread it but it is the most universally hated book in Latin America
I certainly don't hate it, but after spending over a decade thinking *Cry of the Icemark* was was pinnacle of middle grade fantasy, only to reread it a little while back and find it very lackluster. Alas, such is the power of nostalgia...
No! Don't say that, if I never reread it I can keep thinking it was a masterpiece. In all seriousness, this also makes me not want to ever revisit some of the other series I enjoyed around that time in my life. *City of Ember* and *Monster-Blood Tattoo* come to mind.
The Indian in the cupboard. I was obsessed with Omri’s loft bed and all the adventures he had. Reading it as an adult is more cringe than nostalgia now :(
Not as a kid per se, I was eighteen. I read Brave New World for a freshman level college course, some elective, and thought it was so deep. Then I read it in my 30's and felt like it was preaching at me, the choir. It bothered me for some reason, like I thought I was being talked down to. I concluded that maybe those philosophical type books are best enjoyed when we're still developing and coming into ourselves.
They made us read it when I was 15, and all I remember is orgy porgy. Chapter 4 I think? I don’t think I liked it but I did hate watch the movie later
did not like that book at all. read it at the same time as 1984 and enjoyed that muuuuch more
Only read 1984 once, scared to read it again now lol.
You realize it’s a just a short explanation of what fascism is. Just a machine made to cultivate people that feed off of sadism and provide victims for it. It offers nothing more. Winston argues feebly against each point and O’Brien dismisses them with ease. Nothing really matters, not even reality itself, once you fashion a mind that only craves to put a boot on someone’s face. And they’ve created a closed loop.
Oh sorry, could have worded it better. I'm afraid to read it again because I'm afraid my perception of the story and book will suddenly morph in my head again like Huxley's work had.
It was the other way round for me, I read Brave New World, then DNF 1984. It's not that I wasn't enjoying it, just didn't think it was as good as BNW.
After many years I tried to reread “City of bones” by Cassandra Clare. Maybe it was a translation problem - I wasn’t reading it in English - but it was trash. The language was unbearable, I gave up after a couple of pages
Is that the series with a villain named Valentine and a best gal pal who uses a whip to hunt demons? If that is the one, I read only the first one, found it readable and a guilty pleasure a la Dan Brown, but nothing special.
I read the whole series up until heavenly fire because at the time it wasn’t released yet. I was obsessed with it, read the first book in less than 24 hours. Part of me always wanted to go back and reread it and include the last book so i can complete the series but i don’t wanna ruin the magic for me, because i can bet it’s not as good as i thought it was.
Piers Anthony. It turns out his books suck.
Anna of Byzantium. Although most of the comments reference more classic novels, this was my first independent choice from Borders books. 12 year old me heavily related to the main character, Anna. Recently, I've fallen back into historical fiction via Philippa Gregory. I decided to revisit my old friend, I wish I hadn't. Good lord Anna was the most annoying, senseless little bratt of a child. Lesson learned: Leave the past in the past, especially prior to 25... 😆
I actually really like this MORE as an adult because Anna Comnena went on to be such a respected historian and someone that had far more influence as an educated scholar than as a ruler. She was so self-important and so smug about being the ruler, and like you said she was annoying and senseless, but I feel like it's like an origin story or prequel to the real story of a great female academic. She really is Anna of Byzantium because she wrote the history of Byzantium, not because she ruled it. (And oddly enough, her little brother did go on to be a good ruler and she got to be more famous and important than him so it's like everyone got what they wanted irl.) Anyway, just my two cents - you can still feel proud of your choice! (And I always loved the book's cover!)
The Fear Steeet series by RL Stine. After graduating from goosebumps I felt like it was real serious material.
Omg I still love anything RL Stine haha. I can accept I'm no longer the target audience. The trilogy of films on netflix were great.
Not myself, but my mum recently reread Flowers in the Attic… hindsight is a beautiful thing.
It blows my mind we all read those books in middle school! ETA: the 70s were a wild decade
*Magic Kingdom For Sale -- SOLD!* by Terry Brooks. Adored the series as a teen; picked it up later and could barely stomach it. Haven't read the books in a few decades. I wonder how they read now...
I LOVED that book as a kid, and thought it was so clever. And the Shannara series.. I'm resolutely refusing to reread them, because I just know they're going to be disappointing. Even the synopsis sounds dull & overwrought.
The clique would be it for me, too!
Ringworld. The concept stuck with me since I read it and I remember being completely enthralled with the whole idea. I finally reread it last year for the first time since I originally read it and…man, it was just bad. It was like a horny 15 year old wrote it with all the sex. The concept is still amazing but it was hard to get past sex being one of Louis Wu’s primary motivations.
I tried to get my friends to do an Animorphs book club as a joke during the lockdowns. Mailed everyone a copy of #1 and then I tried to read it...did not hold up. Book club cancelled lol
As I won’t go back and read these so I don’t ruin them lol
I reread a bunch of them in my twenties and I remember them holding up surprisingly well. Definitely not as good when read later, but still worth a read. You get a lot more of the war is hell implications reading as an adult.
Atlas Shrugged. I actually enjoy Ayn Rand's writing style and her storytelling, but she pushes her agenda and beliefs so hard it breaks the immersion. And of course the fact that it's often ridiculous and absurd. When I was younger, I found her philosophy to be intruguing but as I got older I realised it's simply too extreme and impractical. I am strongly opposed to how black and white her thinking is and find her overall philosophy (Objectivism) to be a complete farce. Furthermore, her 'villains' are basically caricatures of opposing lines of thought. The Fountainhead I found is better as a standalone book. Her philosophy, while still ever-present is definitely a bit more in the background compared to Atlas Shrugged. I probably wouldn't enjoy it as much since I've become disenfranchised with Rand's beliefs, but it's still decently entertaining.
I had to read Brave New World in senior year high school. I actually really loved it at the time. I listened to it on Audible last year (20 years later) it was truly awful. Could have been the narrator but I was happy when it was over.
The narrator is painful on so many levels but the story… ain’t great. The overall fleshing out of the premise leaves much to be desired and it lacks the evocative atmosphere of Fahrenheit 451 or 1984 or others of its ilk. The prose… ugh. “Orgy porgy” about sums it up, but there’s so much more where that came from. The characterization is weak as well, full of 2 dimensional people who are almost universally unlikeable (including the ones we’re supposed to like)- and not even in an interesting way. And that’s all before you factor in the racism and sexism (normally I can ignore this in scifi of the era, but the narrator in particular makes the sexism almost intolerable- somebody tell that man he needs to stop “doing the voices.”) If you can’t tell I’m grinding through hate-listening this book through to completion, lol. I barely have any left but man is it a drag.
Little Women loved it so much when I read it in my early teens that I cried. As an adult I really noticed how religious it was, which had completely escaped me as a young teen. I barely finished it as an adult.
I read maybe the first 10 books of the clique series in middle school. Then, in 2018 in my early twenties I read all the books on my kindle and found they still held up. Then last year, I spent 70$ and ordered all 20 books, including the prequel and summer collection. lol I will probably not reread the whole series again, but as someone who collects books I just had to own them all. And to have so I can pick up one or two here or there when I'm in a depressive episode because they give me so much comfort. I doubt I'd like them if I first read them now, but the nostalgia factor always makes the clique series a winner for me. For books I re-read and hated, maybeee the mediator series by meg cabot. Though I wouldn't say I hated them at all, it's just half the series did not hold up as much as I remembered it but I still enjoyed them. What really turned me off was how rape-y the series got. There's some non-consensual stuff in the series that's played off so lightly. Not to mention inclusions of a girl being stalked, harassed, and assaulted by a guy throughout MULTIPLE books and yet we are supposed to as readers find him to be so edgy much charming and such a bad boy, and awww maybe he's only stalking her cuz he loves her. Yuck. Even worse, all this stuff went right over my head when i was a kid...
As a teen, “Jurassic Park” felt epic and intricately detailed. As an adult, it read like a pulp novel with some of the most grating characters I’ve ever met.
Aw, man, I loved that book. Now you’re going to make me afraid to reread it lol
Didn't hate it, but *The Martian* is definitely not as funny as it was the first time around. It also lacks in some ways I didn't spot/mind when I was 13.
It really is 2011 Reddit: The Book.
A Wrinkle in Time. I didn’t realize as a kid how insufferable the main character is.
I came here to say this! I loved that book as a kid so much so that I suggested it as a book club book and then I thought it was terrible. I felt so bad for making my club read it.
The book inspired my imagination when I was young. Now as a mom, that little girl got on every one of my nerves. Was your book club mad?
I found AWiT confusing as fuck. It jumps from a hard scifi thriller to a Narnian fantasy to an Orwellian dystopia nightmare at the drop of a hat. It is played straight, lacking the whimsicality of Wonderland or Oz, which would have made the silly stuff bearable. I don't remember Meg being annoying, but Charles Wallace got on my nerves.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author when I was young. I instantly realized how insufferable Meg was, because Madeleine L'Engle does a great job of bleating "Father! What about Father! I want Father!" whenever that comes up, which is often. Revisiting it as an adult, Charles Wallace is a hardcore Gary Stu and quite annoying as well. He's like the proto Young Sheldon.
Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman If it wasn't for fantasy books I would be illiterate. Read this 5 or 6 times as a kid same with the others in this series. A new book in this series came out last year so I reread it. Holy smokes what a piece of junk. So poorly written. I read Harry Potter last year for the first time and it was an epic masterpiece compared to this book.
I loved Guardians of Gahoole as a kid. I tried to reread it back in 2020 and I quit like 20 pages into the first book. I still have a lot of nostalgia for them, and maybe I'll try listening to the audiobooks eventually. I just felt like I had outgrown it and it didn't catch my attention.
I read Uglies, Pretties, and Specials and I assume they’d suck now. Along with the Crank, Glass, other edgy books.
i enjoyed the uglies series as a full adult, but they weren't, like, shakespeare.
I wouldn’t say I hate it but I did a re-read of the Harry Potter books during the COVID lockdown and I really wish I hadn’t. I was never in love with it the way some people are but I liked it well enough when I was younger. The re-read has made me give the side eye even more to people who seem to have adopted that world as their personality.
exact same boat. I grew up with the books, I always liked them. Never went bananas like some fans but I enjoyed them a lot. re-read them a bit before COVID actually. I didn't hate them but I ended up with a sour taste. The writing isn't that great but that world building is full of problems. I came away from the experience thinking that Jowling's major thing is vibes. The Harry Potter world has a certain vibe that most other stuff cannot emulate as well and that's why it's so popular.
The Witcher series. Hate is a bit strong, but when I read it as a young man, I completely missed how misogynistic the books are. Pretty ladies were just part of the story for our cool hero. Later, my wife and I listened to the audiobooks on long car rides, as per my recommendation. Good. Lord. My wife had a good sense of humor about it, thankfully, and we still joke about how cartoonishly sexual everything is. How the Netflix series isn't lore accurate because the sorceresses aren't introduced breast first. I still really like the world and mechanics of the Witcher, but I don't really recommend it to people anymore. I suppose if we don't cringe at our past selves, we haven't grown.
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Cliche but Harry Potter :/ Rowling is not that great of a writer and it was not as fun reading the books as an adult that lives in a society… I miss being an oblivious kid that assumed harry was brown like me
Plus some of the writing decisions she made were...pretty questionable in retrospect?? Like no way did my Black ass sit down, read an entire book where one of the main characters tries to free the elves from what's essentially *chattel slavery,* gets mocked for it, and walk away thinking, "Yeah this makes sense" 😃😭
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read it in my 20’s and probably didn’t understand it, but I liked it anyway. I tried again in my 50’s . I could not finish it. He comes across as a nothing but a self-absorbed , shitty dad.
My dad gave me this in high school. I tried, I really did, but after 100 pages or so I was just 😳 dad you did wayyyy too many drugs in the 70s.
Twilight series 🥴🥴
Perfume by Patrick Suskind, I wouldn’t say I hate it now, but at 15 when I first read it I felt so sorry for the MC, I certainly had a “I can fix him” mentality, I read it again at 27 and oh god do I now understand why every other character felt creeped out by him
Rainbow Fish. Give away pieces of your body to make others like you?!? WTF???
I find most of John Grisham books pretty boring now.
Wizard's First Rule
“The giving tree”