Our youthful reading?

[callmemadam]

This link is to part of an email I had from Crime Classics: Albert Camus’ The Plague.

When you were young (apologies if you still are), did you read ‘Hesse and Satre (sic) and Kerouac and Updike and Greene and Lawrence, piling them all in on long summer days…’?

I read once that most of the books you read in your lifetime, you will have read before you’re thirty. I can believe it, while hoping it’s not true. I’m sure I have a copy of The Plague somewhere …

Comments

[joyeuce]

I am over thirty and have read no Hesse, no Sartre, On the Road, no Updike, about six of Greene's novels, and one novel and one novella by Lawrence. The Lawrences were definitely before I was thirty (the novella was a school set book), On the Road was definitely after, and I think the Greenes were about half and half. For what all that's worth!

[callmemadam]

It sounds perfectly normal to me!

[gwendraith]

I read some Greene and Lawrence and went through a phase of Solzhenitsyn and Uris when I was about 30. I think it's fair to say that I have read more since I was 30 than before. The Plague appeals, I might buy it ;)

[callmemadam]

Lifelong reading is the ticket. I no longer have any interest in books I 'should' read, which I might have tackled when I was young.

[gwendraith]

That's it exactly isn't it? Some of us felt compelled to read certain books in our younger years because it seemed important to read them. Now I mostly read for pleasure ;)

[lethe1]

If I recall correctly, I read one or two books by Hesse, one by "Satre", a few by Greene, and skimmed Lawrence.

[callmemadam]

You seem to fit the model!