This could be from any age really. I remember reading lots of books like Harry Potter as a 4th grader to seem smart to the teachers looking at me but I didn’t understand any of it. When the big YA dystopian boom was happening, I read tons of terrible YA dystopias to seem cool but many of them frustrated me.
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I read what I want to. It’s nobody’s business but my own. Impressing other people is a bore, it is a complete waste of time. Life is too short to worry about what people think. Get out there and life.
I read The Grapes of Wrath and LotR at 12, both to look smart and at the behest of my dad. Both were beyond what I personally should’ve been reading at that time. But Steinbeck is now one of my favorites and revisiting LotR, I can appreciate the depth of the world building.
I read Lolita at 14. I spent the rest of that summer hanging by the road, hoping some handsome grown man would take me on a cool road trip.
I’ve always been more afraid of looking like a pretentious dickwad so I’d fold over the spine if I was reading something fancy on the train.
1984 by George Orwell
When I was in high school I forced myself to read nothing but classics. I enjoyed them but I definitely did not “get” them. I thought If I read anything recent or YA I would’ve been seen as “lesser” and ultimately missed out on a lot of fun stories that I can’t enjoy to their fullest now cuz I’m older. It did leave a lot of worlds for me to discover when I got back into reading years later though, so I can’t complain too much.
Unabridged classics. English is my 2nd language and we studied classic lit in school but they were abridged version. So between 12-16, I would get my hands on the unabridged books and other “classics” just so people go wow.
Most of them were boring or way over my understanding of the world. I read Handmaid’s Tale at 15yo(2002) and I had no idea what the hell was going on but hey I get to tell people I read Margaret Atwood eventhough NO ONE ASKED 🤣 I read it again at 30yo with more appreciation.
When I was in high school I forced myself to read nothing but classics. I enjoyed them but I definitely did not “get” them. I thought If I read anything recent or YA I would’ve been seen as “lesser” and ultimately missed out on a lot of fun stories that I can’t enjoy to their fullest now cuz I’m older. It did leave a lot of worlds for me to discover when I got back into reading years later though, so I can’t complain too much.
I enjoy rereading a lot of the classics I read when I was younger because my interpretations are soooo unbelievably different! When I first read Wuthering Heights I though Heathcliff was the most romantic character ever written, now its like holy shit what is wrong with these people
Both of those are appropriate responses to Wuthering Heights.
Unabridged classics. English is my 2nd language and we studied classic lit in school but they were abridged version. So between 12-16, I would get my hands on the unabridged books and other “classics” just so people go wow.
Most of them were boring or way over my understanding of the world. I read Handmaid’s Tale at 15yo(2002) and I had no idea what the hell was going on but hey I get to tell people I read Margaret Atwood eventhough NO ONE ASKED 🤣 I read it again at 30yo with more appreciation.
Piers Anthony novels in 6th grade. They are written for adults.
Not to seem smart, but to try and fit in with my friends: I attempted a lot of Vonnegut that I didn’t get or enjoy because my friends liked him a lot. And he’s great, just not my style. I tried to read a lot of Heinlein because my best friend was super into old sci fi - I was only able to finish Stranger in a Strange Land, but only because I powered through the last quarter of the book. I couldn’t finish the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and others I don’t remember the titles of. We were also into David Bowie at the time, and he was in a movie adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (who also authored The Queen’s Gambit). So I bought a copy of that (it might have been out of print at the time; I found it on ebay or something), and it wasn’t my style, and I didn’t really enjoy it, but I read it.
Actually my style IS all of the books people complain that people read just to look smart - I legitimately enjoy those and actually get accused of being pretentious or, worse, of being insecure about my intelligence. It’s not true, I just like realism, even (especially?) when it occasionally borders on the mundane.
Not to seem smart, but to try and fit in with my friends: I attempted a lot of Vonnegut that I didn’t get or enjoy because my friends liked him a lot. And he’s great, just not my style. I tried to read a lot of Heinlein because my best friend was super into old sci fi - I was only able to finish Stranger in a Strange Land, but only because I powered through the last quarter of the book. I couldn’t finish the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and others I don’t remember the titles of. We were also into David Bowie at the time, and he was in a movie adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis (who also authored The Queen’s Gambit). So I bought a copy of that (it might have been out of print at the time; I found it on ebay or something), and it wasn’t my style, and I didn’t really enjoy it, but I read it.
Actually my style IS all of the books people complain that people read just to look smart - I legitimately enjoy those and actually get accused of being pretentious or, worse, of being insecure about my intelligence. It’s not true, I just like realism, even (especially?) when it occasionally borders on the mundane.
We gonna just ignore that OP was trying to read books at his reading level to look smart but couldn’t understand them?
We gonna just ignore that OP was trying to read books at his reading level to look smart but couldn’t understand them?
When I was in the 3rd grade I read the whole Little House on the Prairie series to impress my classmates, we had just finished reading the first one as a class. In the end nobody cared that I read it.