At a Second Glance

By: Laura Rodea

There’s a certain renewal in rereading a book. A favorite story can feel like coming home, with familiar characters and beloved moments waiting on the pages. But more often than not, rereading also brings some surprising truths—a new understanding of the story, its characters, or even its themes. Books grow with us, or rather, we grow into books as we change and evolve. A book you read in middle school might offer a completely different experience when revisited as an adult, allowing you to uncover layers of complexity that you didn’t, or couldn’t, see before.

A great example of this is the novel series The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Many readers first encounter this series in middle or high school, where their focus tends to be on the thrilling survival aspects, the love triangle, and the world building that is the Games. However, when reviewing the series as an adult, a different narrative emerges. As the book progresses, you notice the class inequality, the manipulation of the media, and Katiniss' own psychological trauma. The story of a girl fighting to survive becomes a haunting exploration of tyranny, war's impact on society, power structures, and individual lives. Our earliest reading habits teach us to consume stories for their plots, but as we mature, we are more able to appreciate the subtleties of political allegory and human psychology that were always present, but perhaps overlooked at first.

Another good example is a classic like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Many students are introduced to this novel in high school, or even as early as middle school, when they are often too young to appreciate its full impact. If you read Gatsby as a teenager or a preteen, you might view him as a tragic romantic hero, chasing an impossible dream for Daisy, but as an adult, we see him differently. This novel exposes Fitzgerald's critique of the American Dream, which is based on its inherent emptiness and moral decay. Gatsby's obsession with wealth and status, once dazzling, now seems hollow. The glittering parties are no longer entertaining, but futile—an exercise in excess that masks the loneliness and despair of Gatsby. Gatsby's tragedy is not about his loss of love, but rather his misplaced values and how the world destroys people like him, especially the world of privilege. Something that would not be as easy to misunderstand if you came back to the novel in your mid or late twenties.

Rereading is an important experience, given that our perspectives change as we grow. Our emotional and intellectual maturity, life experiences, and social awareness are constantly evolving over time. Books like these mean something entirely different when we read them in our youth, versus re-examining them later in life. What may have seemed like a simple coming-of-age story or a dystopian at first glance, is often filled with deeper subtleties about human nature, systemic injustice, and moral conflicts—issues that can easily go unnoticed reading it for the first time or with a different mindset.

Whether it's returning to a beloved childhood favorite or revisiting a classic you didn't quite connect with, give it another go around. You might just discover that there was more to the story than you originally thought.