Jo Walton over at tor dot com touches on a phenomenon that I’m sure a lot of us have experienced over the years in her piece about “The Suck Fairy”: that little fey beastie who invades our bookshelves, making certain books we loved when we first read them, well, “suck,” when we pick them up for a re-read years later.

One über example from my youth, Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, is a common target of this fairy. When I read these books as an elementary school student, I loved them for the fantasy and adventure; but when I picked them up again as an adult, all I could see was the heavy-handed Christian allegory and casual racism, sexism, and the general awfulness of how Susan gets handled. I still have affection for the books given how much I loved them as a kid, but I don’t expect I’ll be picking them up again any time soon.

I’m sure we all have similar things buried in the dark, snow-covered corners of our wardrobes*.

So much of this, of course, has to do with the way we, as readers, grow and change, our broadened experience making us more aware of and sensitive to certain issues, and giving us a greater ability to perceive levels of depth (or perhaps, lack-of-depth) in the literature we consume. As we evolve, so do our tastes; it’s inevitable that some of the stuff of our youth falls victim to hordes of suck fairies. Youth makes us oblivious to certain things, and yes, it’s sad that the stuff we loved doesn’t always hold up. This, my friends, is life.

The good news that Walton doesn’t touch on is that there exists a force in opposition to the suck fairy – call it the “better than I remember” fairy, or the “Now I get it!” fairy that can help us overcome our despair. Some of the stuff we once enjoyed superficially when we were younger can present new levels of appreciation and understanding and things we couldn’t get into as a kid can become new favorites as we get older**.

So, I guess my response to Walton’s post is one of agreement, but would add that while much of the fuel for our youthful imaginations doesn’t have the potency it once did, some of it becomes more powerful as time goes by._______________________

* – also in my wardrobe are piles of Tom Clancy (Then? masculine military adventure. Now? right-wing screeds), Anne McCaffrey (great worldbuilding and storytelling, but I have a hard time with the rapey stuff), bunches of licensed Star Trek paperbacks (so utterly cookie-cutter and bland, except perhaps when Peter David wrote them), and, of course, stacks of 80s hair metal cassette tapes.

** – I find new things to appreciate in Watchmen every time I re-read it, and if I had given up on Lord of the Rings the first couple of times I tried to read it as a kid, it never would have become one of my favorites. Then there’s the whole 80s music thing – I don’t think my 9th grade self would have appreciated REM and The Replacements back then, but their music of that time really resonates with me now 20 years after it was recorded.