Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
And not everyone is ready for the same book at the same time. I remember reading an article by Steve Allen about reading in which when he was a kid he was supposed to read Moby Dick and he found it a bore at the time, but then yrs later he read it and enjoyed it.
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I think you're right. I read various Victorian authors in my twenties having read them in school but in all honesty still didn't enjoy them; getting on for 40 years later I may like them better but am not minded to try. My problem is that having gone to a convent school I got a belly-full of being preached and moralised at in general and don't really want to have more of the same, and I find a lot of Victorian authors to be very much in that mould.
There's also the issue of language - classic literature tends to be very 'literary' in style, and I think that goes over your head when you're younger (which reminds me of a comment I came across about Glen Cook and why someone like his books so much - the sentences were short and sounded like actual people speaking). As I've got older, I find I tend to appreciate the sentence structure of classic literature more (and I'm much more intolerant of badly constructed writing).