Book club pick made me hate a book I loved in college, here's the shift

Tbh, I used to be the person who defended every classic in our Cincinnati group, even the dense ones. Then last month we read 'The Old Man and the Sea' and I realized I was arguing for it out of habit, not because I actually felt it. Now I vote for smaller, modern novels like anything by Sally Rooney, and I'm way more honest when I don't connect. Has anyone else changed their whole reading taste after one bad book club argument?

1 comments

1 Comment

noah_barnes21d ago

Wait, so one bad debate about Hemingway made you ditch the entire classics canon? That seems like a lot of weight for one book club argument to carry. I mean, I get that 'Old Man' can feel like a slog if you're not in the mood, but it's a pretty short book, and I've reread stuff I hated in my twenties and flipped on it completely. Maybe you just outgrew the way you used to read, not the books themselves, and now you're blaming the argument instead of the actual shift in your taste. The Rooney stuff is fine, but swapping one extreme for another doesn't sound like honesty, it sounds like a mood.