The Case for Rereading the High School Classics
If the act of rereading a book is partly about remembering the you who paged through it the first time, and comparing that version of yourself to the one dipping into that book again, the classics that we read in high school offer endless possibilities for rediscovery, for looking at ourselves then and now. That's part of what makes Kevin Smokler's new book, Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School, so much fun. His homages to 50 titles, including Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Bluest Eye, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and even The Scarlet Letter (he writes, "I don't like it either," but argues for rereading it nonetheless), offers a truly enjoyable trip down one's personal memory lane of books. It's also a love letter to the act of reading, to continual learning, and to making an effort to slow down and savor the good books in life.
Not all of the works Smokler writes about fall into the category of Y.A., or, for that matter, are even books (and his book, of course, is intended for grownups). There are William Shakespeare plays and Emily Dickinson poems and even the fantastic David Foster Wallace essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Many of the books he reconsiders, for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye, while not explicitly intended for teens by their authors, have been huge hits among that readership. The Phantom Tollbooth is widely considered a book for younger readers, and A Separate Peace andThe Bell Jar—the latter of which a friend told him, "is for teenage girls what On the Road is for teenage boys"—are surely read most by people under 20. But more than whether the books are Y.A. or not, the idea of reading what you read then to know yourself better now is part of why I started the Y.A. for Grownups column in the first place. I wanted to reevaluate books I'd read as a kid with grownup eyes ... and I did that, but I also developed an appetite for new Y.A., and a desire to look at what it means to read those books in "reverse," as
Not all of the works Smokler writes about fall into the category of Y.A., or, for that matter, are even books (and his book, of course, is intended for grownups). There are William Shakespeare plays and Emily Dickinson poems and even the fantastic David Foster Wallace essay, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again." Many of the books he reconsiders, for instance, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye, while not explicitly intended for teens by their authors, have been huge hits among that readership. The Phantom Tollbooth is widely considered a book for younger readers, and A Separate Peace andThe Bell Jar—the latter of which a friend told him, "is for teenage girls what On the Road is for teenage boys"—are surely read most by people under 20. But more than whether the books are Y.A. or not, the idea of reading what you read then to know yourself better now is part of why I started the Y.A. for Grownups column in the first place. I wanted to reevaluate books I'd read as a kid with grownup eyes ... and I did that, but I also developed an appetite for new Y.A., and a desire to look at what it means to read those books in "reverse," as