It's like reading the bible when you're an adult and realizing the evil character is God.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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I read Catcher in the Rye pre-high school and thought Holden was great because he recognized everyone for being fake, then I read it in HS and decided Holden was a whiny brat that needed to STFU. Then I read it as an adult and realized he was just a traumatized kid trying to cope.
This was the book I consistently hated at every age.
I could see that he was a traumatised, lonely child. At the same time, he continuously engages in self destructive behaviour while having a superiority complex.
I guess for the time this sort of story may have been groundbreaking, but the fact that Holden never faces any sort of reckoning makes it boring and infuriating. It needed something legendary, like the "it's you" moment from Bojack Horseman.
I read it as a young adult after hearing several others online say it was their favorite book or strongly impacted them. I thought Holden was a whiny kid who did need help, but also really lacked personal accountability for someone who dedicated so much time to calling others phonies. That's ok, of course. Protagonists should be at least somewhat flawed, and it's especially reasonable if they are in the process of growing up.
But I mainly hated the narrative structure. I'm just going off of what I remember for all this, but it seemed like Holden just wandered between a series of significant encounters for the entire story without anything going anywhere. Other than >!the sister and a second encounter with the nuns,!< the characters were just discarded shortly after being introduced. Any scene could have been a good foundation for the rest of the story's development, but he just wanders somewhere else before all but the barest of conflict resolution happens. IIRC the furthest we got was at the end where >!he gets the idea to leave society behind, but his sister says she would miss him and asks him not to, so he just says "ok"!<. It felt like the entire story was the author just pranking the audience about potential character development before yoinking it away with a laugh.
This is exactly why I hated it. The "story" is ultimately static - Holden never develops, or faces notable consequences or even conflict with other characters for any of his actions.
Discussing the book irl or online is usually exhausting, because when I mention that I despise the protagonist, people usually defend him, and thus, the book, on the basis of him being a traumatised teenager.
Static stories where nothing happens can work, but only in a sort of meta way. I enjoy Philip K Dick's novels despite nothing really happening in most of them because of the existential themes they explore.
The most charitable "meta" interpretation I can give Catcher in the Rye is that it is a sort of commentary on how the lack of support for teenagers can cause them to self destruct and spiral. Even then, I feel that the book fails at achieving this, because Holden actively pushes away support at basically every opportunity, and has zero self awareness.
The first ever book I read in a foreign language, turned out to be a lot different from what I remembered when I picked it up and re-read it maybe 2 decades later after having mastered that language.
When I was a kid I absolutely loved the Narnia series, to the extent that I was depressed when I finished the last one. As a young adult I tried to reread the books and was stunned at how heavy handed the Christian propaganda was.
First time I read Lord of the Rings I believe I was 11. And I hated it. Because I was 11. Also I think it was just the first part, Fellowship . Thankfully I've read it maybe half a dozen times since then and I've loved it more and more each time and it's been an entirely different book every single time.
I just reread the series a few months ago. Seeing the Shire suddenly jump from a place of ordinary happiness to a place where Frodo has to sneak from place to place, depending on the discretion of his neighbors, hits a lot differently now than it used to...
Thanks, maybe I should try again.
Has anyone watched that Rupert the Bear cartoon recently?
Most racist shit I ever saw. Turns out a vestige of my childhood was Rupert hanging out with his Asian friend Ping Pong and a bunch of long nailed, thin moustached "Chinamen". Gollywogs level stereotypes and bullshit.
It's rare to be actually, physically agog.
I remember Rupert the Bear being great when I was a child. Let me pull up some episodes real quick
I think there's some on YouTube.
And I got the name wrong, it was "Pong Ping" which is somehow worse
Kind of happened to me with with The Mists of Avalon. I started reading it and was like 'meh, this is sooo boring and sooo long, I will never finish it' and I started reading something else. I went back to it couple years later and loved it. I never re-read books though. Even the books I read 20 years ago I remember so well reading them again feels pointless. I remember all the good parts, character names, some of the dialogs. I would constantly feel the urge to skip parts I already know.
the problem with this book is the author unfortunately
The poisonwood bible. I loved it in high school, because I was an oppressed little atheist/agnostic with hyper religious parents at a christian school. It was brilliant, vivid, groundbreaking, and wild in its defiance of cultural norms...
and now it's just a sort of sad story of how the christian mindset mirrors colonial/empire ambitions and everyone gets hurt.
I could not get through Lord of the Rings or Dune when I tried to read them as a teenager. But I recognized that these were good books that I needed to give another try. Read them again after college and loved them. (Got through all of the original Frank Herbert Dune books, I don't think any of Brian Herbert's follow ups had been written yet, I don't know that I would have read them anyway)
Most of the other books I couldn't finish as a child, I recognized as garbage (Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, for one), and have seen nothing to change my mind about them to give them another try.
That's odd; I'm almost the opposite. I definitely enjoyed lord of the rings more as a teenager, and struggle to really even appreciate them now. I still like the world, but the writing just seems off.
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