At fifteen I hated Silas Marner so much I faked a stomach ache to skip the test. Reread it last month for my dissertation and cried on a train. Which assigned books did you hate in school but love now?
Wuthering Heights. At sixteen I thought it was a book about two horrible people being horrible at each other on a moor, and I wasn’t wrong, I just didn’t yet understand that this was the appeal.
The problem was the way we were taught it. We spent six weeks on “the theme of revenge” and filled in a worksheet about the two houses. Nobody mentioned that the narrative is passed through Lockwood and Nelly, and that Nelly in particular has every reason to tell it her way. Once I reread it as an adult and started distrusting her, it became an entirely different novel, a sort of unreliable gossip chain with a ghost at the window.
I also now find Lockwood funny, which no one told me was permitted. He’s an idiot. He misreads every person in the house within a single afternoon. The novel opens with a man confidently getting everything wrong, which, as a librarian who has watched people search the catalogue, I find very relatable.
So my answer is less “I grew up” and more “I was handed a dull key to an interesting lock.” @yusufwrites, I’m curious what changed with Silas Marner for you. Was it the book or the timing?
I’ll be the teacher in the room and admit some of the blame. We often assign the right books at the wrong time.
Great Expectations is my example. I hated it at fourteen because Pip is a snob and I couldn’t see past that. Now I teach it, and the whole point is that the older Pip narrating knows he was a snob and is ashamed. That doubled perspective is invisible to most fourteen-year-olds, because they haven’t yet looked back on their own younger selves with embarrassment. You need some life before the book works.
I’d go further than @lit_isla, though. It’s not only the teaching. Some novels genuinely can’t be fully appreciated by teenagers, and I think that’s fine. A first reading that plants a book in your memory has value even if you dislike it. Half the adults I know who love Dickens hated him first.
What I’d stop doing is assigning Silas Marner to fifteen-year-olds. That one’s a novel about middle-aged regret. Of course it landed on a train in your twenties.
Disagree slightly with @diegoy. Telling teenagers a book is “for later” is how you lose them entirely. Plenty of fourteen-year-olds can grasp Pip’s shame if you ask them about a time they were embarrassed by their family. That’s the whole hook.
My forced-read-turned-favourite is Lord of the Flies. Hated it as a kid because it seemed preachy. Rereading it, the preachiness is mostly in how it’s taught. The book itself is stranger and sadder.
Mine is The Scarlet Letter, and I’m prepared to defend this unpopular position at length.
At seventeen, I experienced it as a sort of endurance test. The novel opens with a long introductory sketch about a customs house, which is a bit like a film beginning with forty minutes of the director describing his office. My class was told to “push through it,” which is the literary equivalent of saying the medicine tastes bad but you’ll be fine. Most of us did not push through it. We read summaries and wrote about the symbolism of the letter A, which we were assured was very symbolic.
I reread it about ten years later, after working on a few historical manuscripts as an editor, and it turned out the customs house sketch was the part I liked most. It’s Hawthorne being wry about his own ancestors, his job, and the business of writing. It’s actually funny, in a dry, self-deprecating way. Nobody mentioned that it was allowed to be funny.
The main story improved too. Hester is far more interesting once you stop treating her as a vehicle for “the theme of sin” and start watching how she turns a punishment into something like a profession. She makes the letter beautiful. That’s an act of defiance, not just a symbol.
So I’m with @lit_isla on the dull key. But I’d add something about format. The editions we were handed in school were grim. Tiny type, no notes, a cover that looked like a tax form. My adult copy has decent margins and a good introduction, and I’m not ashamed to admit that matters. Presentation affects how patient you’re willing to be.
@petrar, agreed on Lord of the Flies being stranger than its reputation. The scene with the pig’s head is genuinely unsettling once you aren’t reading it with a highlighter in hand looking for “the beast within.” Teenage me underlined it, wrote “symbolism” next to it, and felt nothing whatsoever.