Is it worth revisiting old tales?

November 21st, 2023

I spent the last few weeks going on a reading binge of books I read in my teens. Books that I liked then, books that had an influence on me, and books I wanted one day to reread. So far, I have mixed feelings about it. Few books really stood the test of time. They are still fresh and nice to read and cause the same emotions I had in my teens. About a few I am ambivalent — they still have good messages, but dated terribly (especially with regard to sexuality and gender identity and racial issues) and I cringed quite often while reading them. And there is the last group — books that for some reason are no longer readable to me. Books I liked and remembered fondly, after a reread thirty-some years after the initial read, are in reality a terrible unreadable mess. I might not be surprised by some of those books — it doesn’t take much to impress a fifteen-year-old sci-fi fan — just some aliens and pseud-intellectual monologues about life were enough. I am more refined now and can see the libertarian bullshit and sloppy writing and incel-like tendencies in many sci-fi writers. But what really surprised me though was how I found “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” after reading it for the first time since my early teens.

First of all, I thought I remembered the whole tale very well. Apparently not — there were whole scenes that I completely forgot about and others that were too short or too long for my memories. There was no cohesion and nothing to wonder about and admire, especially with the playfulness of the language used that I remember liking so much. This time it didn't do anything to me. Well, maybe not anything — it made me extremely bored. Now I wonder if that was worth doing. Was it worth revisiting an old book, a book I had a pretty strong positive opinion about, or was it better to find out that something I held dear is actually boring?