Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School
Author Kevin Smokler
Remember reading Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby in high school? Would you read them again now that no one’s grading you, just for your own enjoyment? What do the great books of your youth have to say about your life now? Practical Classics gives you an incentive to reread and a reason why.
Can The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn help you cope with aging? What does To Kill a Mockingbird have to say about being a parent? Smokler guides you through fifty books commonly assigned in English class and shows you why you’d probably enjoy rereading them as an adult.
His essays–witty, down-to-earth, appreciative, and insightful–are divided into ten sections, each covering an archetypical stage of life-from youth and first love to family, loss, and the future.
This not only reminds you about the essential features of each great book but gives you a practical, real-world reason why revisiting it in adulthood is not only enjoyable but useful.
This book is a great resource for a programming event at your library that could reintroduce the best of the classics to the adults that might have once shied away from them, (or even read the CliffsNotes or rented the movie instead of doing the actually reading). I know just reread Bartelby the Scribner myself a few months back, and “I prefer not to,” has become new mantra!”
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