The right age to read a classic

Pretty sure there's been discussion on this before, but it was triggered again for me just now by this article:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/12/is-there-a-right-age-to-read-a-book

She and those whom she quotes make several important points here that I appreciate:

* "The age at which we read a book is of vital importance to the way we experience it but that does not mean that each book comes with a correct age at which to read it."

* "Some people cannot re-read, and therefore what they get out of a book on first reading is all they ever get out of it .... For people like this, who have to get it all in the first read because there can be no subsequent reads, they should wait."

* "One can come to a book too late. I’ve sometimes advised reading books with your twelve-year-old head—and it isn’t always easy to do that, even if you can see you’d have loved it when you were twelve. This is much harder than waiting until you’re old enough, because it means you missed it."

* "One can grow out of books generally—books you’ve read. Sometimes it’s possible to find the twelve-year-old head to read it with, and sometimes it isn’t. This is why there are children’s books and YA that can be read by adults and others that can’t—and of course, the same goes for things that were ostensibly written for adults."

I generally agree with most of those bullets. I am a rereader, but after some disappointments about books I loved the first time around and not so much upon rereading, I am wary now of rereading some things.

And I do think you can be "too late" /too old/too mature to appreciate some books...

Ah, that second bullet. There's only one reason that I am not a re-reader, and getting more out of those books.

My TBR pile is literally, a pile.

I'm a little late to the discussion, but I do think that some books are better at some ages. There are some books that have a layered subtext or deeper meanings that I read at a young age. Not necessarily things that I did not understand, but topics that I did not have the life experience to fully appreciate.
I also believe that you can be too old to appreciate a book. I was almost 40 before I read The Catcher In The Rye. I found Holden to be way too whiny. If I had read the book at 16, I would have sympathized with him a lot more.

>4 thart528:

Funny you should mention The Catcher in the Rye. I read it at 16, not required but because all my exchange student friends had read it and I felt left out, and I hated it. Too whiny and just downright mean.

Then I read it at around age 40 while taking a humor in literature graduate course.... and hated it. So there was no right age for me with that book! :-)

In general, though, I think end-of-high-school-start-of-college was a great age for me to read a lot of the stuff I did, especially dystopian .... at that age, you feel like you're the first one to ever discover the power of dystopian literature! Later, of course, you know better, but the nostalgic feeling remains....

And I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in my 40s and liked it! There are all types.

The really great novels probably all have levels of meaning that come to the fore as your own experience and maturity changes. I read Wuthering Heights in high school and thought it was kind of romance/ghost story. When I read it at the age of thirty, it was suddenly a furious story of condemnation of society's hypocrisies and corrupt sense of values.

I read some classic books at a young age, and then when I re-read them when I had gotten older, I found that I interpreted things differently and appreciated certain things more. I don't think that age necessarily determines when one can read a book, but it does determine how one appreciates a book.