Age-Appropriate Reading

I tried to read the Harry Potter series over the Christmas break--I got half-way through the third one when I found I was skimming through the prose; I decided this wasn't required reading and moved on to other books. Not that the prose was awful (at least, not Stephanie Meyer awful), on the contrary, the prose was very age appropriate. Because that's the thing--Harry Potter is written for children, and the time for me to have gotten into Harry Potter was when I was, say, 10, and not in my mid-20s.

Sadly, Harry Potter did not exist when I was 10, so I missed the zietgeist on that one; a shame, because I can totally see my 10-year-old self getting totally into it. But, it did get me thinking about age-appropriate reading.

Some reading I hit at just the right moment. For example, I first read Catch-22 when I was 17; I remember that book absolutely blew my mind, and that an age when one could use the phrase "blew my mind" un-ironically. I laughed, I cried, and when I finished I was so enthralled by the ending that I went outside and threw the book into the air in sheer ecstasy.

I re-read Catch-22 about a year ago. I still laughed, I still cried, I still enjoyed it, and I still recommend it when people ask for reading suggestions. But...the magic of reading it, it just wasn't the same as when I was 17. I found myself very grateful that I'd read it in High School, and not in grad school.

Some books, even literary ones, I fear I've gotten to too late. For example, I didn't get to reading Wuthering Heights till a couple years ago; an engaging work worthy of being deemed a literary classic, for sure. But, all while reading it, I couldn't shake the feeling that if I'd read that one when I was 17 as well, I would've been absolutely enthralled by that one as well; it would have been so haunting, so dark, so wrong yet so right! But as it now stands, I'm too familiar with the convention of the Byronic hero to find Heathcliffe all that interesting.

Of course, some writing I encountered too early; for example, when I read Tale of Two Cities, in 10th grade English, well, I really might as well have not read it, because I only remember being bored to tears. Note to High School English teachers: a single beheading on the last page does not qualify a work as "gory and violent" enough to engage teenagers. In any case, I really do need to re-read that one because my relationship with Dickens has since vastly improved.

About the same time I read Wuthering Heights, I also read Dicken's Great Expectations, and that one really was haunting. My ex was getting married, I was using my college degree to work as a substitute teacher, and after traveling the world I was once again living at home. Yeah, I was feeling pretty lame; my own personal great expectations had momentarily collapsed. Pip just felt too familiar at that moment. In fact, it was almost too serendipitous to read Great Expectations at that moment in my life. That novel still haunts me. Yet even as I read it I was aware that if I'd read it in 10th grade, it also would have bored me to tears.

Meanwhile, there are some books I've read that I feel I'm still not old enough to fully appreciate. For example, I recently finished a Virginia Woolf binge (I needed to familiarize myself with her work for a paper I'm writing). I very much admire her prose and ideas. Yet I found myself enjoying her non-fiction more than her fiction. At first I thought it was because she was writing in a feminine-exclusive discourse, in opposition to the dominant patriarchy, so, although men were certainly allowed to read, they sadly couldn't participate.

But then, plenty of men have loved Woolf's novels over the years, and Woolf herself writes credible male characters. So what I next noted about her novels is that nearly all her major characters are middle-aged; the passage of time is as much a theme of her novels as feminist concerns. Her characters are all old enough to have to live with the inevitable regret of squandered youth, lost opportunities, and a past that both haunts and evades them. In a sense, I hope I'm never old enough to fully appreciate Virginia Woolf novels.