Anonymous wrote:I think I tried to read Moby Dick like four times and quit. Never got past the part in the town, so never even got to them being on the ship looking for the whale.

Then I was forced to read it in graduate school and oh my gosh, it is absolute genius and I’m so glad I had to read it.

Reading it now. Couldn’t get through it in high school, completely missed the brilliant humor and humanity, wound up reading the Cliff’s Notes. Only on page 150 or so, but completely floored by how smart and funny and biting it is. Father Mapple’s sermon! The Nantucket descriptions! The Cetology chapter! I had no idea. Yes, genius.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For me it's more the opposite. Classics I loved in high school I reread as an adult and was like wtf. Like Wuthering Heights I just wanted to send them all to therapy and didn't find it romantic in the slightest.

Same!

Me, too. Though I hated Wuthering Heights in high school to begin with.
Most of the ones I've re-read as an adult (Huck Finn, Scarlet Letter, Great Gatsby, some others) have left me feeling like I was reading edited versions - shorter, less detailed than I remembered. Maybe all that classroom discussion and writing papers just made them feel longer and fuller?
Maybe I should try reading the ones I hated in high school.

adding: yes, I know that's what OP's point was to begin with.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For me it's more the opposite. Classics I loved in high school I reread as an adult and was like wtf. Like Wuthering Heights I just wanted to send them all to therapy and didn't find it romantic in the slightest.

Same!

Me, too. Though I hated Wuthering Heights in high school to begin with.
Most of the ones I've re-read as an adult (Huck Finn, Scarlet Letter, Great Gatsby, some others) have left me feeling like I was reading edited versions - shorter, less detailed than I remembered. Maybe all that classroom discussion and writing papers just made them feel longer and fuller?
Maybe I should try reading the ones I hated in high school.

Anonymous wrote:For me it's more the opposite. Classics I loved in high school I reread as an adult and was like wtf. Like Wuthering Heights I just wanted to send them all to therapy and didn't find it romantic in the slightest.

I only read Wuthering Heights as a grownup. Also did not find it romantic. Seemed like a story about mental illness.

On the other hand, as a middle schooler, I found Pride & Prejudice boring with not enough romance. Now I understand a bit more about hidden feelings, I like it a lot more. (Plus the Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth series version is legendary.)

Anonymous wrote:A Separate Peace

This was my absolute favorite from high school. Re-read it decades later and kept thinking there was so much more to it when I read it in high school and wondering why on earth I liked it so much. It must have been reading it in the context of class discussions. Class discussions almost always made everything better by pointing out things you didn't catch on your own and making you realize how much more there is to what you read.

Same with "Great Expectations." Loved it in high school. Still great upon re-reading when my daughter decided to read it on her own one summer. But I think having read it, there being two different endings, and having seen various movie adaptations kind of confused me - I remembered things that weren't actually in the book, or remembered them differently than they actually were.

100 years of Solitude. Started and stopped it multiple times. Finally read it twenty years ago and it’s one of my favorite books

The Good Earth by Pearl Buck; Light in August by Faulkner; Grapes of Wrath by Steinbeck. I didn’t engage with them in my teens but loved them as an adult. Conversely, loved Jane Eyre and Madame Bovary as a teen but didn’t particularly like them when I reread them as an adult.

Anonymous wrote:For me it's more the opposite. Classics I loved in high school I reread as an adult and was like wtf. Like Wuthering Heights I just wanted to send them all to therapy and didn't find it romantic in the slightest.

Same!

For me it's more the opposite. Classics I loved in high school I reread as an adult and was like wtf. Like Wuthering Heights I just wanted to send them all to therapy and didn't find it romantic in the slightest.

I think I tried to read Moby Dick like four times and quit. Never got past the part in the town, so never even got to them being on the ship looking for the whale.

Then I was forced to read it in graduate school and oh my gosh, it is absolute genius and I’m so glad I had to read it.

A Separate Peace

Catcher in the Rye

Great Gatsby was an entirely different book than the one I read in HS.

Otherwise, Faulkner.

Lord of the Flies. Reread that as adult. It's a complete mind meld.

The list of books in the referenced post got me thinking . . . what books did you read in high school that didn’t resonate with you then but have made more of an impact on you when you revisited them as an adult? I have to say that I didn’t get Hemingway at all when we read him in high school, but I have a better understanding of the themes now as an adult, although I still don’t love his style.