Book you wish you have read sooner

Name one book you wish you have read sooner and say why

Welcome to LibraryThing. You're starting off with an interesting question, and I don't really have an answer for you.

Most of what I read now, I wouldn't have appreciated when I was younger. Or else I would have appreciated in a different way, but missed the main point. Jane Eyre ought to have made me more open-minded about romance, for example, had I read it as a teenager, but then I would probably not have grasped that message or been swayed by it at the time.

I suppose some of the lighter stuff that I groan over now, I can acknowledge I would have liked when I was younger. No regrets though, since I don't know what additional good it would have done me besides the entertainment.

I can more easily think of stuff I read too young; books that were over my head at the time and now I'm reluctant to read again only because there's so much else I haven't yet. I've read The Brother Karamazov, for example, but don't ask me to describe what it's about now. I suspect I couldn't have told you right after I read it, either.

>2 Cecrow:
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia. Woody Allen LOL

I feel the same about some books that I read too young to understand. Doctor Zhivago comes to mind. Also about Russia.

Any book I read sooner would have meant another book read later or not at all. Some of them wouldn't have been a loss, but whether or not, part of who I am now is because of what I read when I did.

I've usually lived places where my access to English language books was limited. So yes, I wish I had been able to read The Two Towers and Return of the King right after The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, but I read them as soon as I could get them. (I still have trouble understanding that Christmas present.) I have usually managed to have something interesting to read, and usually a cache of books to keep me going if new arrivals slowed down.

For me that would be just about anything by Charles deLint. I only discovered his books about two years ago, even though a lot of them were written in the 1980s and 90s. I am not sure why I wasn't aware of him sooner and feel like I should have run across at least some of his many books in those days when I was reading mostly fantasy.

I also feel like I should have read Charles Dickens sooner, but it is more of a wish that I had been prepared to do so, or that I were ready to appreciate these books that were forced reading in school. I didn't understand then, but I finally do now.

>4 MarthaJeanne:, whoever bought you only the Hobbit and FOTR probably thought they were giving you the Hobbit and all of LOTR, lol.

As Cecrow said, an interesting question. I wish I'd read the Tao Te Ching ealier than I did, especially the edition with Zhuang Zhou's commentary; it would have been good to have come across those ideas & that perspective when younger because having always lived in the 'West' I hadn't really encountered them.

Unlike a couple of ye I've no regrets about reading books when young that I wasn't capable of understanding--I grasped enough to know that there were profound and/or exciting things in them & though I felt frustrated I at least knew those authors were ones I'd return to later. (Besides, I felt kinda grown up reading them which was cool.) And I did.

>8 Crypto-Willobie: :D

What a neat question!

I wish I'd caught on to the Discworld Series earlier than I did. Though I don't think my enjoyment of it was any less for having got to it in my 20s, Sir Terry passed away shortly after I caught up with my favorite sub-series (the City Watch).

And this is one I haven't read and am not currently planning to—I get the impression that I'd have been able to appreciate or enjoy The Great Gatsby if I'd approached it earlier in life. As it is now, the idea of reading it leaves a bad taste in my mouth (I think there are better things I could spend my time reading, mostly).

I wish I'd read Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada earlier. It is one of most gripping fictional accounts of everyday life in a totalitarian regime I've ever read. Maybe the most gripping. It's about a couple trying to accomplish a small act of resistance in Nazi-era Berlin, written by a man who lived through that regime.

>8 Crypto-Willobie: Assuming you've not an abnormally large bank account, how do you decide which kids will get to go to college? and how on earth do you remember all those birthdays?

A Québécoise I once knew told me that her husband said when they married that each childbirth would take her up another step on the ladder to heaven. So perhaps by not reading the book you've done a woman/some women a very good deed. (You of course will have taken great strides into hell but hey, that's what self-sacrifice is about.)

I'll paraphrase Gandalf here:
A book is never late. Nor is it early. It arrives precisely when it means and needs to.

>8 Crypto-Willobie: Damn your eyes. I now have this little pamphlet listed in my library...in the Wishlist, because where else would it be?

It's an 82-page pamphlet, with a nine page introduction, published in 1997, in Australia. I suppose I could check out the copy that's in the library in Canberra, ACT 2600 Australia, except that it's eight THOUSAND miles away, and I no longer fly (in airplanes).

For the entertainment and edification of others:

https://www.worldcat.org/title/contraception-and-common-sense/oclc/222374361

I must confess that I have never read, nor even seen that book. And I do not have any children (that I know of), only cats.

I dug up that title just for the joke's sake...

>15 Crypto-Willobie: Oh, I figured you'd never seen it, but I found it funny to think of it as a book someone wished that they'd read. It wasn't in your library (and I'd have been a bit surprised if it had been), but I love a good detective hunt, and that certainly was one. What *really* made me laugh was that I could purchase the book, for a mere $5....except that's not US dollars, and the shipping to the US is another $12. I had to talk myself out of it.

I do love this place, though. Where else would I have this kind of fun, and for free, and at no charge?

You have one of those libraries that makes me want to visit. You're safe, though, since I don't travel, and am a hermit. There can never be too many books.