My friends and I were having a discussion about our favourite books and we talked about “being too late” to appreciate a book. I kind of get the sentiment and was wondering if others agree. So one of my favourite books of all time is Perks of Being a Wallflower and read it when I was 17 and I remember just thinking about it for a long time and always going back to it. It just cut so deep unlike anything else. I wondered if I had read it now at 29 if it would have nearly the same impact.
Also, I read Looking For Alaska for the first time this year and while I enjoyed it, I found myself wondering how blown away I would have been reading it as a teenager. I just know I would have appreciated it so much more and while I still love John Green I don’t know if his books will ever hit me the same again.
On the other hand, I’m sure there are books that I didn’t appreciate before that I certainly would now!
I feel like I was a really lucky kid, my mum introduced me to some really good books when I was young and we’d have discussions about them. I read The Stand at ten, then Pillars of the Earth, I read a lot of Sharon Penman and Barbara Erskine. I was a really mature kid and I had read the entirety of the children’s library by the age of eight so I was introduced to more mature books quite early.
After I had finished a book me and my mum would spend hours talking about them, like what would we do differently? How did it make you feel? What was the author trying to say? The gift of reading from my mum is the best gift that I have ever received.
I understand this approach wouldn’t work for everyone but for me it was the right one.