Books to read when you're young

http://www.flavorwire.com/298020/30-books-everyone-should-read-before-turning-30?all=1

Flavorwire posted this pretty solid list of 30 books to read before you're 30, which made me wonder which classics are just as good whenever you read them and which really should be read before 25, let alone 30. For example, I read Camus's The Outsider last year and it was OK but I wish I'd read it at the same time I read The Plague and The Fall, and I felt I'd missed my chance to love it. (No idea why I didn't read it way back - it was in a Cure song FFS!) And On the Road turns to bullshit after a certain age. Then there are books like To Kill a Mockingbird, 1984, The Trial or most Vonnegut that are enduringly great but lose the power to blow your mind as you get older. So, two questions:

1. How many on the Flavorwire list have/had you read before 30? (17 for me, with 3 more after turning 30)
2. Which books do you think need to be read early? (obviously not counting books explicitly pitched at younger readers)

three with maybe three more that i would read

I could not read past that "yes, even for guys" comment.

Surely the idea that novels written by or beloved by women are somehow inappropriate for men is REALLY something one should have grown out of by the time one is 30. Or about 15, even.

Books you shouldn't touch before 30, maybe ever:

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - do we really want more 'spiritual' sorts walking around the earth?
1984 by George Orwell - reality TV is great!
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess - the film was made by Kubrick which means this is automatically stupid.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - Napoleon is boring.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway - "totality of war" is a waste of space as a subject.
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin - er, why? you can get this from textbooks, its in the curriculum
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - are you a geek or a nerd? who cares!
Lord of the Flies by William Golding - John Carey wrote his biography, ignore it.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - I am very suspicious of "anticommunist materpieces"
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell - marketing manual?
The Art of War by Sun Tzu - sounds like some Daily Torygraph bullshit to me!

Should have cut my intro and just written "Please argue about this arbitrary list"

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Tartt’s obscenely beloved first novel — pagan rituals, elusive love affairs, youths murderous and studious in equal measure — should be read freshman year of college, during the winter. Trust us.

otm but it remains a ripping yarn afterwards.

Well you never know where a thread should go. Most likely it will be args over lists.

Think I read only a couple of these before 30. Don't think there are any hard and fast rules about it. No bks lose their power by a certain age, more important is how you come to them in the first place which can be conditioned by where you live, what kind of person you are, what songs you've heard or the experiences you've had (or been deprived of having) by then.

Suspect it would be hard to build any list around this..

feel like there's a Gaiman dark twee what-if-myths-are-real thing that has to be digested and shat out by your mid-twenties IF THAT.

Mostly there's a mix of transgression, challenge and identification that can give you a kick in adolescence. Not quite enough of that transgression, obstinacy, independence here - schoolroomy list.

Reading Dostoevsky early was important to me; very different from reading him now.

practically, it's good to read long books early - teens and early twenties likely to have scads of time and the stamina to get through huge classics. Though iirc if you go in too early it can involve not understanding every third word and forgetting everything that happened 3 weeks later. Still, you can say you've read them.

& wcc otm

i didn't read secret history or middlesex, and i probably never will. they are such midlist keystones, and i am just prejudiced against them even in spite of recommendations.

what about that book "Hatchet" where the guy gets stranded in the woods. classic, baby

this is a good question: what books do you resist reading, in spite of the fact you would like them? i say 'confederacy of dunces' and a lot of DFW and malcolm gladwell

Confederacy of Dunces is great, Remy. Give in.

I haven't read it since college though so I might feel differently now.

WG Sebald maybe for me.

I had read 16 of the 30 before 30 (before 20 probably). I haven't read it in ages but I'd definitely say The Stranger should be read young.

Much as I love him, I also think there's a critical window for Ray Bradbury. I tried to reread Something Wicked This Way Comes last summer and, beautiful as the text was, I just couldn't press on.

i love midlist keystones, but secret history is so whatever to me; it's not even that satisfying as a suspenseful read and donna tarrrrrrght comes off insufferable in it.

i have read middlesex too, and i support your decision to ignore it, remy.

I couldn't finish Secret History.

(sebald was for 'resist reading, though I'd enjoy him'. Probably not someone you have to read early. But I wouldn't know. I haven't read him.)

Didn't really like Middlesex, & Virgin Suicides would make more sense on a read-early list imo.

Doing a quick count I think I've read maybe 20 of these and I'm pretty sure all of them were before the age of 30, and at least 15 before 20.

Stuck altogether there's an air of gauche teenager's bookshelf, but only Lord of the Rings and Catcher In The Rye I'd denounce as straight bullshit. Most of the others I either like or like significant bits of. You'd probably get more out of them reading when you're old, especially the ones that are most about "youth".

I suspect DL's right about On The Road getting worse the older you get, although I wasn't crazy for it even at age 18.

i like the midlist fiction too - it's much of my library - but it's variable in quality that it's hard to take a recommendation. i read 'catcher in the rye' at age 18 and was immediately confused as to its popularity. adrian mole did a lot more for me.

also the line in the initial article about 'to kill a mockingbird' losing potency with adulthood is some straight b.s.

x-post re OTD: I think so too but it's another I haven't read in too long to say with certainty. I read it junior year in HS and I distinctly remember my English teacher (a nun) telling me that it wasn't a nice book for me to be reading. ha.

to kill a mockingbird is pretty clumsy

this is a good question: what books do you resist reading, in spite of the fact you would like them?

That whole list of 30, for starters.

No, jk, I've read some of those. Wholeheartedly support swapping Middlesex for The Virgin Suicides.

Mostly there's a mix of transgression, challenge and identification that can give you a kick in adolescence. Not quite enough of that transgression, obstinacy, independence here - schoolroomy list.

Absolutely. That's why I didn't want to get into discussing the list because it's not quite what I mean. It's too staid. On my pre-25 list I'd have something like The Magus by John Fowles. It's big, it's got a rite of passage, transgressive sex, a conspiracy and some light postmodernism, so at 17 I thought it was the best thing I'd ever read and 10 years later I found it pretty ridiculous. I don't think anyone's going to have that experience with Invisible Man. When you're young you tend to love stuff that says "They're lying to you, man!" or "There is no God/morality!" or "Maybe mad people are sane and it's the rest of the world that's mad!" or "Sex with goths is cool!"

When I raised this on Twitter a lot of people mentioned Catcher in the Rye. I think, if anything, it's now underrated. I see it as a story about the aftershocks of bereavement, not the lionisation of adolescent angst. Salinger was too smart (and, at 42, too old) not to realise that Holden was annoying.

Some classically adolescent things I read when I was 14-18: Clockwork Orange, Cuckoo's Nest, 1984, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, TS Eliot, Fear and Loathing, On the Road, Kafka, Camus, Watchmen, Sandman.

And while we're being pernickety about the Flavorwire list: Beloved, Toni Morrison
Possibly the best book in the Western canon — horrifying, deeply strange, and epically wonderful. is a bit much.

Virgin Suicides is a marvellous book - Middlesex is the kind of hugely self-conscious follow-up that Michael Chabon attempted, scrapped and ended up spoofing in Wonder Boys.

I've repped for it elsewere, but I think Robert Cormier's Fade is/was a hugely important book to read at 15.

Yeah, not going to add anything to this, but I agree that the ones that hold up here are the most obviously transgressive or rebellious (actually I lie, I'd include some Burroughs). The rest don't really mean anything in the context of 'read before 30' - why? Why not just 'here are some books we think are good'? What is the point of their inclusion in a specifically age-based list? Also, before 30 is such a weird age span to cover. I could understand before 20 or even at a push before 25 as representing some 'young' state, but they're stretching that idea too far.

Uh, in case that first sentence was confusing, my lie was that I wasn't going to add anything but then did. The clauses were all out of order.

I didn't like lots of the adolescent classics then - found On The Road a grind, ditto Lord of the Flies, still find Orwell very dull. The stuff that I loved in an adolescent way, then rejected, I've mostly come back round to - Burroughs, Plath, Berryman, etc (I was/am more of a poetry person, which makes this sort of a different conversation). Things can't ever be the same, but we're friends again, y'know.

Oh, Martin Amis might be a (maybe strictly British) must-read-early.

xps emil.y otm, can only really think of this in 'before 20' terms.

as the days run away like wild horses over the hill etc etc, think i wld be more interested in 'books to read when you're old'

Same here - really am against articles like this just in case they get the younger crowd to try these terrible books. Even w/Burroughs I would say don't go near Naked Lunch. Glad I started reading Camus later, 25+.

Reading Philip Dick -- one paperback after another over a period of two weeks when I was 16-17 -- left an impression. Also Kafka, but it was years before I got onto the short stories.

But I don't know if that was tied to adolescence. Things like this are v good and would leave an impression at anytime in my life. It was just stuff that was around.

xp = but would you though? I don't like the bks for retirement strand = Proust and Tolstoy and the like. Again really long books just because you have the time kind of thing.

I don't think I would have finished/appreciated Joyce and Pynchon and Spengler and Vico if I hadn't been introduced to them during a critical undergraduate window.

remy im going to join in w/enbb here and say that confederacy of dunces is something you really should not avoid

it's on my shelf. i'll read when i'm done with draggin' ass newsun

I just finished A High Wind in Jamaica. I would've loved it at 14.

Good call. High Wind to Jamaica is a weirdass book with bizarro sexual undertones, and the bowlderized movie's got li'l martin amis in the lead http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_WpFCelCiZOI/SYYTDZ3Gf_I/AAAAAAAAC8E/zDKeaIKKAug/s400/high_wind_ship.jpg

good premise for a list, but wasted opportunity. 'before 30' suggests books that people ought to have read after college, when first trying out adult non-student life. but the list mashes together a lot of books that are at most 'before 20' with some others whose 'must read before' value seems questionable to me, especially with the thought of postcollegiate adults in mind.

i once found myself teaching thoreau's 'walden' round about the same age that thoreau had gone to walden, and this bit, just after the 'quiet desperation' passage, seemed especially cutting to a thirty-ish reader then:

I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.

from personal experience / failed experience i would put wordsworth's 'prelude' on a 'before 30' list too.

Walden is definitely a book that ages well. Actually, all of the transcendentalists speak more truthfully now than they did when I read them in high school / college / graduate school. I *get* the humor, and the sarcasm, and the irony on a gut level, and I feel like they are - more than most things I've read - entirely different books by parallax.

good premise for a list, but wasted opportunity.

Yeah, I think the subtext here is more "...so you appear well-read to others" rather than "...because they are more worth reading while you are young than at any other time".

Particularly disagree with the inclusion of Gatsby as a "before you're 30" imperative. I read it at 18 for uni, knew it was 'good' but didn't think much else of it. Read it again last year (age 30) and found it amazing and devastating and nothing like I'd remembered. It's a book that's specifically about not being young any more, isn't it? And there was no way that could have resonated with me a decade ago.

yeah gatsby is a book i totally did not get in high school.

Likewise, Brideshead, Revisited was lovely at 18 and dullsville afterward.

i think brideshead revisited is maybe just a book you should read once and not subject to too much thought.

Amazon reviews of classic novels are full of angry high schoolers going idgi

maybe i'm just resentful as i'm about to turn 30 and haven't read a few of these, but i find lists like this incredibly depressing. there's few things more disspiriting than seeing a novel you liked reduced to some glib one-liner -- 'oh, yeah, that's the one about the kids on an island,' 'oh, yeah, that's the one about all the fucked-up southern ppl.' any novel that's actually good is going to surprise you when you read it, and isn't going to be reducible to 'classic dystopian future' or 'the novel that spoke for a whole generation' or whatever.

if any of the 'adolescent classics' are worth returning to later in life, it's because they're not actually 'adolescent classics' at all -- they're just books that teachers like to assign. i was pretty ho-hum about 'lord of the flies' when i read it in HS, but i recently reread it and found it almost too horrifying to get through. reading about kids murdering each other is a whole different experience as an adult than it is when you're barely a few years out of childhood.

secret history, maus, the road, infinite jest, jesus son, ghost world - all came out after i turned 30 so i'm either shit out of luck or off the hook

my son read the road in high school this year, in fact he was just explaining it to me today :)

vonnegut, science fiction, lord of the rings were my touchstones as a teen and while i'm not tempted to re-read em now i wouldn't fault any adult who does

good premise for a list, but wasted opportunity

Very true. List is confused between "This book is important, read it early" (ie Great Gatsby) and "This book only works when you're young and naive and earnest" (ie Catcher in the Rye)

Where do The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier And Clay and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists fit in with this (i.e. the last two books I've read / am reading - PS I'm 31 and what is this?)

J.D. OTM. Fuck reading a book before you're 30 anyway - you should be out having your own adventures and making your own mistakes. Under 30s don't need no stinkin' books.

(kind of mean that tbf)

so glad I read Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret before thirty -- probably the two most influential books on me as reader and writer. I reread them every year.

i've never read either of those! but a lot of my favorite kids' books i didn't encounter until i was older -- the moomins, 'the mixed-up files of mrs basil e frankweiler.' maybe 'high wind in jamaica' if that counts.

i reread 'fahrenheit 451' the other week -- went through it in two nights. while i don't think it's beyond the understanding of any intelligent kid there are definitely elements that seem a lot more resonant and sad when you're an adult -- like montag having a horribly empty, meaningless marriage but still somehow loving his wife. what struck me more than the book's actual content, though, was the zest and naturalness of bradbury's writing, almost giddy with sheer love of the language and its possibilities. whereas when i've returned to vonnegut (someone who once seemed more 'serious' and mature and important to me than bradbury) as an adult, he strikes me as kind of sour and facile, like someone who didn't really enjoy writing that much.

A kid should probably read Demian and Siddharta both (Hesse) of which offer lots of good advice for naive, romantic, angsty adolescents into books. Such 20 yo guys should then go for A Movable Feast (Hemingway) and migrate to a world capital. Now, what is appropriate when you are 30 yo?

I find Vonnegut unreadable generally tbh.

I spent most of the weekend reading Bradbury's short fiction, amazed by how easily he achieves his effects.

it's been more than ten years since i read 'gatsby' - never read it in high school but maybe four or five times in college - and i can totally see how it would deepen with age, even if i can't much remember it to know what would deepen. (i read it in a twofer edition with 'tender is the night', which was always a big struggle for me: i remember thinking, good gosh, this seems like some heavy stuff.) but. it seemed really easy to know that whatever was going on, it was really beautifully written. that seems like a capital thing to have teenagers, college students, or (if it has to be that late) pre-30s 'have to' read. how much chance do people in general have to read a beautiful thing?

I spent most of the weekend reading Bradbury's short fiction, amazed by how easily he achieves his effects.

I haven't read Bradbury's short fiction for ages (I remember Something Wicked This Way Comes). That did reminded me how much I love this from F451 -

His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed to the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.