For me, it was Perks of Being a Wallflower. I read it multiple times when I was younger and I will always cherish it. I remember my few friends teasing me for my enthusiasm for the book but I truly felt like I was finally being heard.
What about you? Would you read it again or do you go back to it from time to time? Do you feel like it has shaped who you are today? Do you still like books like it?
by nyquillstan
6 Comments
Vampire Academy and Bloodlines series
I probably think more fondly of a lot of the Shakespeare I read in high school now than I did at the time.
Picnic at Hanging Rock. Out of the litany of books we had to read in English class it’s the only one I loved at the time and still love to this day. I think the movie is better and creepier but I still bust out the book from time to time. I remember a lot of my classmates being bored by it, but I was already into that kind of low-key simmering horror outside of school so I was so happy to find a book that captured a feeling that I thought was only possible in film.
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. Would definitely read it again now, but I remember it so well still after 20 years I just think about it on occasion and still enjoy the feelings and memories I had from back then. It’s traveled with me through several moves, and I might be ready for another reread soon but I’m not yet certain I want to supercede the immature teen experience I had on the first two or three reads… probably will, though, it’s a delicious and heart-rending book.
Edit: to answer your last question, I haven’t found another book like it since and haven’t felt the need to, I enjoy it so much for itself. The next one I found that captured a similar essence is Bankok Wakes to Rain. Both are melancholy while (I feel) acknowledging the amazing sensation of life we each have within grasp for a short, bittersweet ‘flash in the pan’.
Dune, and also the Hitchhikers Guide series. I’m almost 40 now, and I still love these enough to reread them.
As a teenager — IT for sure. I read it on its paperback release in something like 1986 or 87. I would have been 11 or 12. But the book that really hit me hardest as a kid was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. Primarily for the sense of adventure in being stranded on an island but your leader is a genius engineer and his right hand man is a sailor who knows every species of animal in the south Pacific and specifically what they taste like. Of course, the book makes no sense whatsoever. The castaways get blown from Washington DC to the south Pacific in a hot air balloon by a hurricane. And when the island blows up at the end they’re left stranded on a floating block of granite.
Anyway, reading that book at like 9 years old was pretty magical. I got about the same kind of feeling from IT because the main characters were my age. I’ve re-read both books a handful of times since.