Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
These days I do a lot of re-reading, and it highlights some things, like: memory is fallible; we change; all books have faults; sometimes the faults don't matter. All simple and obvious lessons, but nothing drives them home so well as experiencing them.
And sometimes the faults do matter. Sometimes understanding what we missed earlier is part of our own development, or as noted above, just part of understanding that we have developed; I'm not the same person I was 30 and 40 years ago, and this is a good thing. There was so much (good and bad) then that I didn't recognise back then and there was a lot that I read that I just sort of took on faith.
In these discussions we get to see books through the eyes of others, and with the help of others get a more complete historical and social background. What we learn may change us, and may change how we introduce the books to coming generations. Not that we would censor the books, but we might make extra effort to share the expanded context.
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Yes I agree with all of this. The book hasn't changed between readings, but of course we have.
My real problem with
Anne of Green Gables is that I read it only a few years ago, simply because it had never come my way when I was a child and I knew it was famous. I didn't enjoy it then, and I enjoyed it even less this time around when I was reading it more critically with the club discussion in mind.
The issue of the teacher and pupil mentioned by some is I suppose an example of something which to our modern minds has more potentially sinister overtones than I think was intended by Montgomery at the time she wrote the book. Not that predatory behaviour didn't happen back then, but that it wasn't seen or expected.
Last year when we read
The Graveyard Book, which I enjoyed very much, I was prompted to go back and read Kipling's
Jungle Books to pick up on the way in which Gaiman had paid tribute to those books. I had read them as a child and loved them. I enjoyed rereading them after such a long time, perhaps with that childhood memory affecting me. These days of course Kipling is much criticised for his colonial attitudes towards "the natives", but I can accept that he was of his time.