![\"Catch-22\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/9\/99\/Catch22.jpg\")
I have, in fact, just checked Catch-22 <\/i>out of the library. I wrote a major paper on it in college. I read it again in 2001 after the September 11 attacks and the launching of \u201cHomeland Security.\u201d<\/p>\nI grew up in a United States \u2014 perhaps a whole world, but I\u2019m staying with my experience \u2014 that was a youth culture.<\/p>\n
Older people ran things, of course, and still do, despite the youngish tech billionaires of the day, but the concept of what is cool and good and the thing to do is built around youth.<\/p>\n
And of course, I am from that generation that said \u201cnever trust anyone over thirty.\u201d<\/p>\n
I am considerably over thirty now.<\/p>\n
This is not a rant about what\u2019s wrong with young people. I like young people. Generation Z reminds me of my activist and hippie youth.<\/p>\n
I think they\u2019re smart and have a lot of great ideas and we should listen to them.<\/p>\n
But one thing I keep figuring out is that I understand things more deeply now than I did at 19. Or, for that matter, at, say, 27.<\/p>\n
We writerly types tend to also be readers and one of the things that comes up regularly is re-reading books that mattered passionately to us when we were young.<\/p>\n
I have, in fact, just checked Catch-22 <\/i>out of the library. I wrote a major paper on it in college. I read it again in 2001 after the September 11 attacks and the launching of \u201cHomeland Security.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve just started my re-read. It\u2019s possible that Heller will be one of the few male \u201cliterary\u201d writers of the 20th century that I will be able to keep reading.<\/p>\n
I read so many of those guys when I was young, working around their misogyny, identifying with the male characters and learning to despise certain kinds of women. I can\u2019t do that anymore. It was destructive then; it\u2019s just too painful now.<\/p>\n
But there are writers who shouldn\u2019t be thrown out with the bath water, so to speak, even if they are \u201cof their time\u201d as the polite term has it.<\/p>\n
Rereading books is how you discover which ones to keep. <\/p>\n
The thing is, when you have been reading and otherwise paying attention to ideas for a very long time, you grasp things that you missed or weren\u2019t ready for when you were young.<\/p>\n
In fact, there are some books you probably shouldn\u2019t read when you are 16, not because of their \u201cmature\u201d content, but because you will likely miss the point.<\/p>\n
I hated The Scarlet Letter<\/i> when I was 16 because I thought it was a puritanical text about the evils of sex. When I read it in my fifties, I realized that a major chunk of it was satire of the Puritan tradition \u2014 something that it never occurred to me that a 19th century writer would do.<\/p>\n
(It\u2019s also got a lot of male romantic ideas in it, but Hawthorne was a man and probably shared those ideas. I find them amusing, but his satire on the Puritans and the witch trials is hilarious on purpose and absolutely brilliant.)<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also quite likely that you will find much less when you reread a book that mattered greatly to you at 21. A lot of what seemed cool in youth did turn out to be superficial, but I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s possible for most of us \u2014 me included \u2014 to see that without the benefit of time and experience.<\/p>\n
I once embroidered a line from Asimov\u2019s Foundation<\/i> on a backpack \u2014 \u201cViolence is the last refuge of the incompetent\u201d \u2014 but while I still think that\u2019s a great line, I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll put the book on my reread list.<\/p>\n
Of course, some things will stay the same. I reread The Great Gatsby<\/i> about fifteen years ago when so many smart people were raving about how great it was and found it was still a slight book about mostly awful people. It was beautifully written, but I don\u2019t think it comes close to being the \u201cGreat American Novel\u201d despite all the praise it gets.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s out of copyright now. I look forward to someone doing something interesting with it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s funny. All those male writers from the first half of the 20th century had an obsession with the idea of writing the Great American Novel. I particularly associate it with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, though there were others who shared that dream.<\/p>\n
(Dashiell Hammett wrote circles around both of them, but detective novels don\u2019t count in the Great American Novel sweepstakes.)<\/p>\n
Somebody finally did write the Great American Novel, but it wasn\u2019t any of them. ![\"Beloved\"](\"https:\/\/m.media-amazon.com\/images\/I\/613vQdXPDwL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
It was Toni Morrison and the book was Beloved<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I probably should reread that, though I am not sure I have the courage. It was hard enough to read the first time. I\u2019m sure I missed things, because I ended up reading it fast.<\/p>\n
I couldn\u2019t have read that as a teenager, because it wasn\u2019t written until the 1980s. It came out in 1987.<\/p>\n
But I wonder how I would have reacted to it as a teenager.<\/p>\n
I notice it\u2019s one of the books those who want to sanitize U.S. history are banning from the high school libraries and reading lists, but the reason it\u2019s the Great American Novel is because it takes on one of the deep sins and crises of our history and makes the reader understand it.<\/p>\n
Novels about male angst don\u2019t have the same depth.<\/p>\n
Beloved<\/i> is a deep and complex book, but I think it will reward readers of any age.<\/p>\n
Some truth is there on the page no matter how old you are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I grew up in a United States \u2014 perhaps a whole world, but I\u2019m staying with my experience \u2014 that was a youth culture. Older people ran things, of course, and still do, despite the youngish tech billionaires of the day, but the concept of what is cool and good and the thing to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[335],"tags":[671,670,669],"class_list":["post-2613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-beloved","tag-catch-22","tag-rereading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2613"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2614,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2613\/revisions\/2614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}