Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This is another hard topic for me! I generally don’t shift much in opinion once I’ve made my mind up about something (it takes me a while to get to the mind-made-up part though). Although I’ve historically done a lot of re-reading, it’s not been so much a thing for me recently, so it’s hard for my opinions to shift too much. But here’s my best shot at it:

The Great Gatsby: This was the first thing that came to my mind, because when I read it as a high schooler I hated it, but when I read it again after I’d been in college a few years I loved it (still do). While it may be appropriate for high school on a prose level, I think it’s hard to appreciate this novel without some rough life experiences behind you.

Anna Karenina: This feels like cheating a little, because the first time I tried to read this (in high school), I dropped it about 100 pages in because it felt soooo boring. So I didn’t actually read it the first time, but when I picked it up a few years ago, I loved it and flew through it in like, a week. Another one where life experience really helps connect you to the novel and characters.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: I legitimately loved every single entry of the Harry Potter series as I read them when I was a teenager. And when I re-read the whole series a couple years ago, I loved them again. Except for this one, which I’ve started thinking of as Harry Potter and the Teenage Angst. So. Much. Stupid. Drama. Which is honestly probably fairly realistic for that age group, but was so tiresome to read about.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: I haven’t actually re-read this one since high school, when I loved it. But when I think back to it, I wonder what all the fuss was: as hard as it tries to convince you it’s about a bunch of devil-may-care sassy dames, it’s actually about a bunch of self-centered overgrown adolescents who are bound together by their love of making excuses for themselves. I have no desire to ever read this again.

The Prince: I tried to read this in high school and thought it was incredibly boring. A more recent re-read shows it to be a really astute look into governance, which I wasn’t as interested in then but I am interested in now, so I think it’s more about my preferences shifting than anything else.

Uglies: I got pretty into this series early in college (my younger sister had the books and I borrowed them), but looking back on them, it’s hard to believe I took books with something called “The Pretty Committee” seriously. I don’t think they’re awful or anything, but I’d no longer be inclined to read or recommend them.

Tuesdays With Morrie: I found this really touching when I first read it when I was 18 or 19, but reading it a few years later, I was dismayed to find it mawkishly sentimental and trite. I grew up reading Mitch Albom’s columns in The Detroit News and he’s a talented sportswriter, but I don’t want to read any of his books again.

Go Ask Alice: Not that I would have been the type of kid to get into drugs, but I found this really horrifying and realistic when I read it when I was around 13 or so. It was based on a true story…or so I thought, until an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Liar City, when they exposed it as complete baloney.

Flowers In The Attic: I actually read this whole series as a teenager and loved their over the top drama. When the first novel went on sale on the Kindle for $2 recently, I thought I’d revisit it. They do not hold up and I couldn’t get more than a few chapters in.

Evening: This is a fairly recent one…I read it right after law school, after seeing and enjoying the movie, and really liked it, finding the story heartbreaking and poignant. When I was cleaning out my bookshelves right before my last move, I remembered it was about a woman who never really gets over a one night stand at a wedding and though it’s written well, I couldn’t fathom ever wanting to read it again.