15 Books You Hated As A Teen — But Should Give A Second Chance As An Adult

Very few hormonal teens want to have a book about hormonal teens explained to them by a boring adult. Also, romance is not cool because it is associated with girls and girl things, and so most high schoolers (and most adults) end up rolling their eyes at Romeo and Juliet. Read it again, though, and you just might find that it's a beautiful story about gender subversion and how adults would prefer to let teens die in the streets rather than compromise on their own stupid politics.

Yes, all the characters in this book are the worst. They're supposed to be the worst. The Great Gatsby is not a book about long lost love, it's a damning critique of capitalism and the so-called American Dream. Read it again, and you might find that all those glitzy Gatsby-themed parties are kind of majorly missing the point.

With The Odyssey, it's really all about the translation. If you could never get into Fagles, ditch him for Emily Wilson, the first ever woman to translate The Odyssey into English. Her take on the story is riveting, modern, and highly read-able.

Your English teacher might have told you that Lord of the Flies is about humanity's fundamentally violent nature. But what if I told you that William Golding was actually trying to point out English chauvinism, and flip the script on racist depictions of "savages"? Lord of the Flies is a re-write of Coral Island, a popular British children's book about perfect little British boys stranded on an island with "savage" natives. Golding wanted to subvert the imperialism of the original book by pointing out that the "civilized" British are the ones who bring violence and savagery to the rest of the world, and not the other way around.

Honestly, I don't care if you hate Pip and Estella and Magwitch from Great Expectations with all your heart. Everyone needs to re-read this book for Miss Havisham, possibly the greatest feminist icon of all time. She gets jilted on her wedding day, and decides to just stay in her rotting wedding dress forever and dedicate the rest of her life to ruining men from afar. Truly, a role model.

I remember a lot of people complaining that this book was too hard to read in eleventh grade English, but looking back... wow. Invisible Man is a symphonic, nightmarish odyssey across the United States, from the Deep South to the basements of Harlem. Ellison explores the violent racism that exists even in the most "liberal" of spaces in his existential masterpiece. Just... give it a second read, if you had a hard time following it the first time around. Ralph Ellison won't let you down.

Sure, there are more than a few problems with Jane Eyre's torrid, Gothic romance. Like the fact that Jane forgives her rich, ugly boyfriend for locking his mentally ill wife in the attic and then lying about it. That's... not great. But Jane Eyre is also one of very few old school romances that depicts a lady who is independent, self-sufficient, and only comes back to her boyfriend once she can be considered his absolute equal.

I feel like a lot of people remember Brave New World as some kind of low-rent 1984. But the two dystopias are actually quite different: 1984 takes on fascism and totalitarianism, and Brave New World is more of a horrific tour of late-stage capitalism. Take a second stab at it, and you might find that it still has the power to make you feel wildly uncomfortable about our consumer-based society.

Yes, the monster is supposed to be sympathetic. I remember being a little disappointed when I read Frankenstein in high school, and it wasn't a fun, schlocky, monster-hunt adventure. But the actual novel is far more interesting than that: it forces us to look past appearances when we decide which character is truly monstrous.

My god did this book bore me to tears back in the day. Now, though, I can recognize that all those pages of unsettling despair had a point. All Quiet on the Western Front intends to show war as it is: not an exciting tale full of heroes and villains, but as a meaningless death march for young people who happen to be wearing different uniforms.

Look, you don't have to fall madly in love with The Awakening. But Kate Chopin deserves maybe a second glance for writing a major, controversial feminist classic. This book was shocking for suggesting that married women could have sexual desires and just feel sort of meh about motherhood. And for (spoiler alert) suggesting that a woman might prefer to walk slowly into the sea rather than adhere to traditional gender roles.

If you hated reading The Crucible, your teacher did you a huge disservice. Witches! Communism! Repressed trauma! It doesn't get more exciting than this. Once you get past the antiquated setting, The Crucible is an edge-of-your-seat classic about American's repressive, Puritan roots (and also a little bit witches).

I know that ancient epics aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you couldn't get past the verse as a teen, maybe try Beowulf again as an adult. It is, after all, a piece of classic literature in which a dude fights a monster, and then that monster's mom, and then a dragon, and basically nothing else happens and it's excellent.

Wait! Before you scroll away in hate and disgust! A lot of people truly dislike Moby-Dick, and I get that. It's the high seas adventure novel that dares to stop the plot every few pages and give you informative background on the institution of whaling. But, but! If you suck it up and give Melville a second chance, Moby-Dick is actually full of slapstick humor, proto-environmentalism, and a heck of a lot of homoeroticism. Plus, Ahab is a pretty darn great character.

Full disclosure: I was one of those obnoxious kids who liked The Catcher in the Rye. I'm sorry. I know that Holden annoys a lot of people, but... the book is still a pretty great depiction of a disaffected teen boy trying to perform masculinity while processing the death of his little brother, OK?! Yes, Holden sucks. But also, a lot of pretentious teens find it unbearable to read about another pretentious teen being pretentious. And maybe, just maybe, if you give Holden a second shot, he won't annoy you quite as much, as Bustle writer E. Ce Miller discovered on her re-read.