From: twain@milton.u.washington.edu (Barbara Hlavin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Re-reading of childhood favorites (was Re: RAH)
Date: 27 Jul 92 20:10:16 GMT
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle

>In article <0095E2AA.A3911600@Msu.oscs.montana.edu> alisg@Msu.oscs.montana.edu writes:
>>That leads me to my question: Have any of you gone back and re-read books from
>>any genre that you loved/liked as a child, up through, say, high school? Did
>>the book hold up well?  Was it awful? Why do you think either reaction
>>happened?
>
I've been listening to this conversation off and on since I was seven and 
overheard my aunt Ruth Mary tell my mother how deeply she regretted 
re-reading _The Little Lame Prince_.  As this was a book I had wept over 
only a short while earlier, I inquired the source of her distress.  
Heedless of my tender sensibilities she snapped, "Because it's reeeeally 
sappy!" 

For singular entertainment value in this vein, check out _The Most of 
S.J. Perelman_, in which he has a handful of essays about re-reading 
youthful favorites.  These give me great joy.  Here he is on re-reading 
_The Sheik_, in "Into Your Tent I'll Creep":

	"At any rate, it was in this pungent milieu that I made the 
acquaintance of the immortal Lady Diana Mayo and the Sheik Ahmed Ben
Hassan, and when, after a lapse of twenty-five years, I sat down 
recently to renew it, I was heavy with nostalgia.  A goodish amount of 
water had gone over the dam in the interim and I was not at all sure 
Miss Hull's febrile tale would pack its original wallop.  I found that, 
contrariwise, the flavor had improved, like that of fine old port.  
There is nothing dated about the book; the bromides, in fact, have a 
creaminess, a velvet texture, I am certain they lacked a quarter of a 
century ago.  Any connoisseur knows that a passage like 'She hated 
him with all the passion of her proud, passionate nature' and 'I didn't 
love you when I took you, I only wanted you to satisfy the beast in me' 
acquires a matchless bouquet from lying around the cellar of a 
secondhand bookshop.  No slapdash artificial aging process can quite 
duplicate the tang.  It must steep. 

	"The opening paragraph of _The Sheik_ is, possibly, the most 
superb example of direct plot exposition in the language.  Instead of 
fussing over the table decorations and place cards, like so many 
novelists, the a;uthor whisks open the door of the range and serves 
the souffle piping hot.  In the very first line of the book, a 
disembodied voice asks someone named Lady Conway whether she is coming 
in to watch the dancing, and gets a tart reply:  "I most decidedly 
am not.  I thoroughly disapprove of the expedition of which this dance is 
the inauguration.  I consider that even by contemplating such a tour 
alopne into the desert with no chaperon or attendant of her own sex, 
with only native camel drivers and servants, Diana Mayo is behaving 
with a recklessness and impropriety that is calculated to cast a slur
not only on her own reputation, but also on the prestige of her 
country.... It is the maddest piece of unprincipled folly I hav 
ever heard of.'

	"That, I submit, is literary honesty of a high order, to say 
nothing of a forensic style Cicero would have envied.  It does not 
abuse the reader's patience with a complex psychological probe of 
Diana's youth, her awakening womanhood, her revolt againstd narrow 
social conventions.  It tells him with a minimum of flubdub that a 
madcap miss is going to be loused up by Arabs and that there will be 
no exchanges or refunds." 

He covers _Tarzan_ in "Cloudland Revisited:  Rock-a-bye, Viscount, 
in the Treetop."  

--Barbara 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books