When the Suck Fairy flits.

[sartorias]

I maintain that there is a perfect time for most books. Then, yeah, the Suck Fairy lands.

But what about the times when the Suck Fairy goes away?

Come talk about when old faves suck and old stinkers unsuck!

Comments

[readinggeek451]

I tried to read Moby Dick in 11th grade and bounced off after three pages (and this in the days when, if I started a book, I finished it). I had to read it for a Literature class in college, totally dreaded it, and found to my surprise that I liked it. In fact, I was the only one in the class (upper level Lit seminar, upperclassmen and grad students) who liked it all of the way through. A lot of people (not just my classmates) complain about the long digressions about whaling, etc., but I thought those were the best parts!

[sartorias]

I never took to that book, and can't bring myself now to read the stuff on whaling, but your observation is so true for me for other great books of the nineteenth century. Sometimes the digressions are the best part.

[mamculuna]

I dind't read MD until after grad school!! And then, loved it so much. I needed to know a lot about the literary conventions Melville was playing with, I think.

[danceswithwaves]

Book View Cafe keeps eating my answers, so rather than writing it again over there, I'll just comment here.

Whenever I say I loved X book or series that I read at a certain age, and get a response like "oh, I couldn't get into it," I say "I read it at X age, which I think was the perfect time to love it." I generally get a lot of nods or yesses when I answer like that -- I think people understand that sometimes age makes a difference for liking a book or not.

And if I liked a book at a certain age, I'll generally recommend it to that age group, even if I don't like it anymore.

[asakiyume]

And for this reason, I don't feel too disappointed if my adult friends don't happen to love a book that I loved when I was 11. It's sort of a well-you-had-to-be-there situation.

[nancylebov]

The examples so far haven't exactly been about the suck fairy leaving, since the suck fairy specializes in leaving inferior versions of books that you liked or loved, and everything so far has been about books that people started out disliking.

Any examples of books that looked good, then bad, then good?

[sartorias]

Oh, interesting question.

First to mind comes some friends who read Lord of the Rings in high school, adored it, then scorned it college age and just after for some of its more orotund phrasings (This is the doom that is deemed) and the total lack of interesting women, outside of Eowyn. (Nobody counted Lobelia Sackville-Baggins.) A lot of those friends went on to other things, but I was talking to one of them some years after that, who had picked it up again to see what she'd ever seen in it, was swept away, and left weeping at the sense of a passing age that overwhelmed her. She said that characters who had seemed minor came to life, their observations sharp, profound, wise, especially passages around Faramir. "None of those fantasy writers now write anyone as complex as Faramir," she said.

[whswhs]

That happened to me with Ayn Rand, but with her philosophy, not with her fiction. The first thing of hers I read was her essay "The Objectivist Ethics," and that totally convinced me-it was the first thing on ethics I'd read that made sense to me. By the time I was in my thirties I had decided that her philosophical positions largely didn't apply her premises consistently. But over the past ten years I've come to think that her thinking is both more coherent and more sophisticated than I used to recognize-but you need to be familiar with classical philosophers such as Aristotle and even Plato to get where she's coming from; even some of the deeper problems I still think are there reflect things like her adherence to Aristotelian rather than Darwinian metabiology.

[sartorias]

Aristotelian metabiology! There is a concept I haven't heard about for a very long time. While I am too allergic to Ayn Rand, I expect, to ever read anything about her again at this end of my life (too little time and too many books!), it might prove interesting to delve back into this aspect of Aristotle and compare it to Darwin, and later. Thanks for the idea!

[martianmooncrab]

Tried reading the Oz books and was just horrified by them... maybe I needed to read them while I was young and my reading habits were unformed. Back when if it was a book, I read it.. gulping down anything and everything.

That Suck Fairy lurks about and pops when you least expect it.

[sartorias]

Yeah, that's for certain!

[martianmooncrab]

The Suck Fairy is like the person in your group that thrives on conflict and discord, when one person loveslovesloves a book and recommends it to everyone else, and you cant get past the first few pages, and then ... try to explain why you hate it, and its the same reasons why they love it. Not a happy time that is.

[sartorias]

Yes! And you wonder what's wrong with you, that you are the only person in the WORLD who doesn't respond to it.

[puddleshark]

Last year the suck fairy finally stopped hovering over Great Expectations...

I was made to read it at school and hated it. Tried it again about ten years ago when I realised that there were some Dickens' novels that I really liked, but it still left me cold.

Then last year I bought the Naxos unabridged audiobook version and, hearing it read aloud, I finally managed to get enough distance from the first person narration - and suddenly it was wonderful.

[sartorias]

Cool! That is interesting that the omni narrator (a standard nineteenth century voice) threw you out.