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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I get the author's point that sometimes the right book at the right time can have an outsized impact and to reread it years later might dull the memory. In that case I get not rereading it.

But great books are rereadable in part because you can go back to it at different ages and get something new out of it each time. For me _Walden_, _Self-Reliance_, and _The Republic_---to name a few---do just that.

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It's also worth rereading books that shaped you because sometimes with maturity you see they weren't great, and were manipulating you -- fiction that stacks the deck so its characters are forced to act out the author's fetishes, nonfiction that uncritically accepted bogus studies, and so on.

As a teen, I thought Catch-22 had a sad ending, and Slaughter House Five had an upbeat ending. Then rereading in my late twenties, I thought the opposite. In the following decades, I've gone through all the possible permutations.

I missed my optimal "catcher in the rye" window I think - I read it when I was too young and it seemed like a book about someone deciding to throw his entire life away. found it way depressing and never read it again, but in retrospect it was just teenage angst that would seem unremarkable but not very compelling to read about right now.

I read Catcher in the Rye as a teen and enjoyed Holden's angst.

Now I'm approaching middle age. Last year I was looking for books to read in a language I'm learning. I decided to re-read Catcher, and to my surprise, found it heartbreaking. I mostly remembered the plot, but it was a completely different book to me as a man than as a boy.

Everything Holden does is in the shadow of his grief over his dead brother. As a kid, that flew over my head. I couldn't have understood the hole in your heart that comes from losing someone you deeply love and admire. I didn't get the sad chain of cause and effect - there are hints at how it affects everyone in his family.

It's a beautiful and subtle book, and it rewards re-reading later in life.

thanks, i'll give it another read! i definitely missed the subtlety as a kid.

I was like the GP, thought I'd missed my "window" with that book - I tried reading as a late teen, but found Holden so unpleasant a character (he reminded me of kids I'd known, who'd been awful people) - so I never returned to it. Your comment made me interested to try again. Thank you.

Just as a counter point, I found catcher absolute shite and I have no idea why anyone ranks it so highly. It’s one of those books everyone claims is their favourite however it’s immediately clear to me when someone says that, that they’re not much of a reader.

Which is fine, I’m glad they enjoyed it and whatever but personally I thought it was a bad poorly written book that doesn’t deserve anywhere near the love it gets.

I don't feel like dying on the hill of Catcher in the Rye - while I think it's a good book and worth reading, I have no desire to write about it beyond the words I chose in my comment above. But I have to say that your comment here is of exactly the kind that diminishes the quality of Hacker News. Mindless name-calling: "absolute shite," "bad poorly written book," and you sneer that anyone who claims it as a favorite is "not much of a reader." No reasons, no evidence or examples, just name-calling. Ironically, your own comment, in ignoring the context and content of the whole thread, which was about the merits of reading and re-reading, seems to suggest you're "not much of a reader" yourself.

What you offer is not a "counterpoint," as you put it. It's the equivalent of: "I don't like ketchup, ketchup is bad, people who like ketchup are stupid."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of...

Plus there are books where you just want to immerse yourself again and again in the story: Raymond Chandler's novels, Lord of the Rings, William Gibson's Neuromancer. Sometimes books are just fun.

Not quite as intellectual, but rewatching movies from your youth is similar. Movies that you thought were deep or moving turn out to be rather formulaic tripe -- you just thought they were deep because you hadn't seen the tropes in them before.

Worse is rewatching with someone who's never seen it and you just told them "this is great film!"

I'm currently rereading Malazan Book of the Fallen series. It's a slog, but I'm noticing much more stuff I missed the last time, and the bits I thought I remembered correctly are definitely not they way I remember.

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