[ SECRET POST #2701 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2701 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[The Almighty Johnsons]


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03.
[X-Men Evolution]


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04.
[The Dreaming Machine]


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05.
[Parasol Protectorate]


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06.
[Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Interview with the Vampire]


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07.
[Marvel Disc Wars: The Avengers]


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08.
[Orphan Black]


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09.
[Team Fortress 2]


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10.
[Severus Snape, Gerard Way]


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11.
[Neil Patrick Harris/Ramin Karimloo (Les Misérables/Hedwig and the Angry Inch)]


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12.
[Gakuen babysitters]


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13.
[The Walking Dead Game]


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14.
[Billie Piper, Penny Dreadful]


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15.
[Sherlock]












Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 084 secrets from Secret Submission Post #386.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

Yesterday's Xanth subthread got me curious about books I read when I was younger, so I went and grabbed a book I first read in my freshman year of HS to see how it held up.

Dear lord Fantasy Lover is... Kind of ridiculous. I mean, you'd guess that from the title, but... Ridiculous in a good way. I mean, it has Eros/Cupid using the euphemism "stick your spoon in her jelly jar", which will never fail to crack me up.

I had completely forgotten about the stalker, though. His plot line was wrapped up rather quickly, and I honestly hadn't remembered how that scene ended obviously, since I had forgotten the stalker in the first place, and that honestly threw me for a second, especially considering recent events.

In the end, Julian says that their daughter, Vanessa Anne, is named after Aphrodite, but I'm not sure how. Ah well.

Reading it, I definitely recognized/remembered some of the plot cliches used in later books (girl had bad ex, new boyfriend is awesome and so much better than bad ex in any way possible, new boyfriend and girl run into bad ex, and bad ex gets his ass handed to him), but I enjoyed it.

Has anyone else reread anything lately?

Re: How do old books hold up?

[mekkio]

I reread Poppy z. Brite's Lost Souls the other day. It was one of my favorite books as a teenager when I was heavily in my goth phase. (Have since lost the ankhs and eyeliner but kept the music and the horror movies.) Man, her prose is so purple it could be a back up dancer for Prince.

I think my problem is that I love crime noir now. And that genre is quick, minimalistic and to the point. The very thing Lost Souls is not. To make it even worse, I didn't remember Brite being so bad at writing dialog. It is so cheesy.

I still like the book but it's not longer on my altar of great books. Just on the altar of fun, supernatural books.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[sarillia]

Can you recommend some crime noir? I love noir too. I especially love the classic hardboiled stories by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

I don't think I've ever read that one, but it sounds like the book I was talking about. :D

Re: How do old books hold up?

[th0rns_n_r0ses]

Lost Souls was one of my favorites as a teenager as well, but I've found that as I've gotten older I prefer Drawing Blood.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[sarillia]

I just reread an Andrew Clements book called The School Story about a sixth grader who secretly gets a book published through her editor mother. It was adorable and I still liked it. Sometimes I get in a mood to read books that have something to do with writing and I'll probably put this one in the rotation.

I was also rereading some Philippa Gregory. I got into her Tudor books in middle school and the beginning of high school. The soap opera-ishness is showing more than when I first read them but they're still entertaining.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

Andrew Clements' books are all wonderful. They're so inventive, and I love the way their kid characters are smart and curious without descending into the 'smart kid surrounded by dumb adults' cliches. The "You have a right to remain silent!" scene in 'No Talking' gets me every time, lol!

Re: How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

My favorite was a toss-up between that one and A Week in the Woods. I loved how Woods had an adult acknowledging that they were in the wrong about something, that always stuck with me, and I loved the audiobook of The School Story... I wonder if I still have it somewhere.

But yeah! Andrew Clements! It makes me wish I had younger people (niblings/baby cousins etc.) around that I could read him to. :D

Re: How do old books hold up?

[a_potato]

The only book that I've re-read recently is 'Ender's Game' (and, yeah, the author and his views are problematic, but I own the book and he wrote it before he went off the deep-end). It definitely still held up. It's a fantastic piece of fiction.

Otherwise...I recently started reading Charles Dickens' work, and I've liked it quite a bit. I feel like that counts, since it's so old.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

I feel like I've read that book, but I don't remember when, or if I know any of the plot. I might need to read it, I've heard it's good in spite of OSC's personal views.

That counts! I just finished Great Expectations myself. It was a lot better than I was expecting it to be tbh. :D

Re: How do old books hold up?

[skippydelicious]

I reread the Discworld series recently, and I gotta say the early books (apart from Sourcery) hold up probably better than the most recent ones. Feels like the last few have suffered a bit of bloat. Equal Rites and Wyrd Sisters are still the best though.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

I didn't really like the first book- Guards! Guards! I think?, and it actually turned me off of reading him for a long time, but I haven't read his newest books either. I liked Thud!, Monstrous Regiment, and The Nightwatch (so much love for Nightwatch), but I don't know where those fall on the scale of age. ^^;

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

If I have to pick my favourite Discworld books, it comes out Nightwatch, Reaper Man, Small Gods, Interesting Times and Carpe Jugulum. They have this thing about choosing your fate, about standing up for things even when it's scary, about the reasons people fight and the things they fight for, about how small things matter so much even on the hugest of scales. I always come back to those five.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[solticisekf]

+1 I didn't get around to finishing the book about the tosher.
I also liked the first book about Tiffany which isn't very popular, it seems.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[icecheetah]

The last time I re-read a book I appreciated it more than the first time round. That is, the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. I didn't get it when I was 16.

This prompted me to look up one of the first books I ever read. "Jemma and the Welsh Rabbit." I had looked for it before but it didn't seem to exist! And now... I found someone listing it on ebay.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[loracarol]

I honestly haven't read much Asimov, I should fix that.

I know that feeling! There was a book my teacher had read to us in third grade, and I honestly recently just found it again. :D

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

I started re-reading Foundation a couple of years ago, but Life Intervened and I'm still only a third of the way through the Prelude. I read the first three when I was nine, and definitely didn't appreciate them, thought they were boring as anything. :-P

...I should take them up again, they're still on my ereader.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

I've re-read The Baby-sitter's Club books... oh dear lord, the unintentional racism and ableism as an attempt to make kids less racist and ableist. It's frightening. And then there's Ann M. Martin's non-American characters....

Also, I re-read Harry Potter, though I usually do, and while I still love the books I sort of realize things I never realized before - really little things, nothing major, but for example her transitions can be horribly lazy. And everyone... talks... like... this.... sigh.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't re-read it, but I read a Royal Diaries book a million times about Elizabeth I as a teenager keeping a diary, except... it essentially painted Elizabeth I as the Good Witch and Mary I as the Bad Witch, which is apparently pretty inaccurate - Mary I supposedly adored her sister, it was only when they were both up to inherit the throne that things got ugly. So that's a little annoying.

On the flip side, I re-read Sideways Stories from Wayside School, and I totally didn't catch how metaphorical those books were.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

I re-read the Little House books a few years ago, some 15-ish years after I'd first read them. They still weren't bad, I got through the whole series.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[(Anonymous)]

So here is my experience with rereading/revisiting the authors I read growing up.

Heinlein: revisiting the juveniles is still fun, even though I have to regularly tell the Tumblr voices in the back of my head to SHUT UP. Rereading his "second age"/post-Crazy Years stuff, I suddenly understand aaaalllll the skeevy stuff that I just thought was weird/went way way way over my head at the time I first read them. Yeah, it doesn't hold up well.

Ellison: This was the one that really surprised me; I recently (last week recently) reread "I Have no Mouth..." and I was...meh on it. Makes me afraid to revisit anything else by him, because clearly this indicates I have completely lost my mind. And/or my taste and/or good sense.

McCaffrey: Yeah, no. No no no no no no. Very Bad Idea to reread anything by McCaffrey after you're about, oh, twelve. Even then it's iffy.

Asimov: I'm the anon currently slowly working my way through Foundation again. Seems okay for the moment, but unfortunately I'm having the "everything else ever was derived from this" with it so far.

Gibson: Hey, cyberpunk was my adolescent self's formative reading. But, yeah, very very very very dated, these days. Sadly. A lot of the Mondo 2000/Mirrorshades crowd's writing is the same, now. :-(

LeGuin: I honestly think this is the only writer on my list who has stood the test of time, and I get something new out of every re-read.

That's all I can think of, right now.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[kamino_neko]

Last book I loved that I tried to reread was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...and I found it a lot more tedious than I remembered from when I was a kid. I keep meaning to give it another go, but other books keep getting in the way.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[slashgirl]

I've reread Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery (author of the Anne of Green Gables series). It's my favourite book by her. Holds up well, as do the first few Anne books (I didn't like the later books in the series, even as a kid).

I've also re-read some of my Trixie Belden books (mystery series with Trixie as the main character). I loved Trixie more than Nancy Drew. And I still enjoy them, even though the language is from the 50s (ie, Trix and pals wear dungarees, not jeans, I mean they are jeans but not called that in the books) and it's genre writing, but it's enjoyable.

I read VC Andrews books a lot during my teen years, though I got away from them after the fourth or fifth series, cus it was the same story, just with different names. That being said, I still like the Heaven/Casteel series--esp. the first couple books. The writing is crap, but I like the story.

I got into horror fic when I was 13--started with Stephen King but branched out--Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Ramsey Campbell, Anne Rice.... Most of the books I've kept by these authors, I still enjoy. I only kept the first three of Rice's vampire series cus after that, they went to shit, imo.

There were a couple books we were assigned to read in school that I didn't like--To Kill a Mockingbird, which I barely managed to read, and Lord of the Flies. Which was the only book I ever used Coles Notes for--it was unreadable to my teenage self and I was a voracious reader. I wonder if I'd like them any better now that I'm an adult.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[solticisekf]

Sherlock Holmes is great, not worse then the first time.

Bridgite Jones Diary is a bit damp on the second read.

Re: How do old books hold up?

[tabaqui]

I reread books from when i was a kid all the time, and my favorite ones still hold up. I mean - i re-read Tex the other day (S.E. Hinton), and I'll even sit down and read 'Socks', which is by Beverly Cleary and is about a *cat*, and I still love it.

So...i guess my favorites never grow old.