Scene's Changing, Bro

Via Sully we read of a dude's connection to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer having changed when reading it in his 20s instead of 18:

In the five years since I last read it—the time elapsed between repetitions—five years’ worth of life has accumulated. Reading my chosen terms of “family” and “obligation” as thematic signposts is as obvious a reflection of my present life as “asses” was for my eighteen-year-old self. If my first reading was an initiation into the narcotic and transformative powers of reading, this second time is my initiation into the truth of the repetition. Of time isolated as a variable, its effects measurable amongst the data of memory.

I read The Moviegoer about a year ago and felt pretty much nothing about it at all. And I didn't give a shit about The Confederacy of Dunces either. But I will say that the crown jewel of this sentiment for everybody has to be The Catcher in the Rye, of course:

Like anyone who was a teenager, The Catcher in the Rye had a hold on me in my youth. And I still have a warm spot for it, and nothing stops it from being a really, really good book. But the older I get the less it means to me. I mean, I've never thought to myself "Gee, I wonder what Holden Caulfield would do in this situation" as I might with, say, Tom Joad. At the end of the day, Tom Joad is Paul Westerberg in 1984, and Holden Caulfield is your average Williamsburg hipster in a nouveau-rock art fusion no-bass-included Japanese haiku band: for all we know the last time we read of Tom walking away from Ma is followed by him getting his head bashed in for not being happy to work for 3 cents a day; Holden we're fairly certain will simply end up at another private school for fellow rich kids, and in a  few years he will look back on his melo-dramatic teen years and laugh. Both characters' stories have merit. But only one actually grows with you the more you experience actual life.