WSJ: Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

Excerpt:

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

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DEAR BOOK LOVER
MAY 9, 2011

Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

• By CYNTHIA CROSSEN

Many years ago when I was in college, I took a course on the modern European novel. We read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," which many of us liked so much that we asked our instructor if we should read some other books by Mann such as "Buddenbrooks" or "The Magic Mountain." He told us that neither of those books should be read by anyone under the age of 40. Can you think of books that will not reveal themselves fully to the reader until one has reached, say, the age of 60? Or books that one may have read at an early age that ought to be reread once one has the experience of having spent six decades or so on the planet?

—Tom Ulen, Champaign, Ill.

"Age-appropriate" is a useful adjective in the world of children's books, but there are no such handy ratings for adult books. Yet unquestionably, some books are more adult than others. What would a 20-year-old make of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" or G.B. Edwards's "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page," whose 80-year-old narrator disliked using even a telephone? Conversely, don't "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Little Women" have greater charms for young adults than for their grandparents?

Everett Collection

Approach classics like "Moby Dick" with an open mind.

The danger in reading far ahead of your stage in life is that you might conclude the book is bad (stuffy, rambling pretentious) and dismiss it forever. This happened to me with Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady," forced on me in a college literature class. For many years after, it was a novel I loved to hate. When a book club I belonged to chose it, I kicked and screamed, until I fell under its spell. I was too young for James when I was 21.

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

Speaking for teenagers through the ages, Mr. Adler continued, "Shakespeare was spoiled for generations of high-school students who were forced to go through 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' scene by scene, to look up all the words that were new to them, and to study all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never actually read the play. Instead they were dragged through it, bit by bit, over a period of many weeks…. They should have been encouraged to read the play in one sitting. Only then would they have understood enough of it to make it possible for them to understand more."

It's said that you never step into the same river twice, and that's also true of reading. You are a different person from the impatient adolescent or the college procrastinator who had to grind out a term paper in a weekend. So pick up that classic you hated in your youth, and take advantage of your maturity: You now know that it doesn't matter if you understand every word.

Five years ago, O (Oprah's magazine) published some essays about reading hard books. One of them, by Geoffrey Sanborn, who teaches literature at Bard College, was about "Moby-Dick," a book that has always terrified me. "These days most people think of 'Moby-Dick' not as a strange, wild, sad story," Mr. Sanborn wrote, "but as a Hard Book, full of boring whaling talk and hypersubtle symbolism…. As a result, most readers begin the book with their guard up.

"But 'Moby-Dick' wasn't meant to be a rigorous, depleting experience…. It was meant to be a stimulant to thought and feeling; it was meant to make your mind a more interesting and enjoyable place. So if the prospect of reading 'Moby-Dick' makes you feel even a little bit daunted…get an unannotated edition with no introduction and no essays in the back. Clear your mind of expectations and open it to chapter one. Listen with nothing more than ordinary human curiosity to the voice that begins speaking to you."

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at [email protected].

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