Have you ever read a really big, famous book that came out a long time ago? And then maybe you got really excited and wanted to talk to everyone about it...but...everyone was already totally over it?
Sadly, this isn't a hypothetical question. Last week I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the first time and figured out what everyone already knows: it's amazing. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I was dying to talk to people about it, but kept getting responses like, "Oh yeah, I think I read that in middle school," or, "Yeah, I really liked that when it came out. Um, you know it's a movie, right?"
This happens to me all the time. Three of my current favorite books came out in the last century, but they're new to me.
The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992) I read in 2013.
The Liar's Club (Mary Karr, 1995) I read last fall.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky, 1999) I read last week.
Sometimes the stunted conversations about old books that I am newly excited about are disappointing, but if I'm left to my own devices, I usually turn to the internet. I love to look at books' Wikipedia pages, and learn about how the book was received when it was published, whether that changed over time, and if there's any juicy backstory about the title or the author. By the same token, I also love looking up the original reviews in the New York Times. And online author pages, like this one for Lauren Tarshis's I Survived series, are great places to immerse yourself in everything about a book, even if it's not new.
Sometimes I also imagine having read the book when it was published, and whether my reaction would have been different then. I am certain, for example, that I would have loved The Perks of Being a Wallflower if I had read it in 1999. And I would have read it through the lens of my own high school experience.
Now, all these years later, I realized I read it from the lens of a parent. I texted a young, non-parent friend of mine who had read The Perks of Being a Wallflower as a sixth grader. In his memory, the book wasn't sad until the big reveal at the end. I was shocked—I was in near tears on every page! As a parent, I imagined the protagonist Charlie as my own child, and the slow burn of his loneliness and anguish were too much to bear, even before I knew about the awful thing that had happened to him. I read it differently as someone raising a child than I would have as someone who was close to childhood herself.
So...anyone out there want to talk about The Perks of Being a Wallflower? (And I'll be back on Monday, having Netflixed the movie, surely brimming with excitement about that, too!)
