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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haffrung" data-source="post: 7770983" data-attributes="member: 6776259">People who read books for school should be taken out of the equation altogether. They're not picking books they want to read, so those books have no bearing on their taste or their preferences. And believe it or not, there are adults who read Dickens and Melville. And who willingly read/attend Shakespeare. Some people genuinely do love the language, the characters, the subtlety. The nuanced insights into human nature. They seek out challenging literature and drama as adults - works they wouldn't have understood when they were 15 - because they enjoy it. Find it rewarding. Just as there are people who start entering Spartan competitions and marathons in their 30s. Just because a great many people never run a lap or shoot a basket once they graduate high school doesn't mean running and sports are activities only for teenagers. Setting aside the intractable issue of low culture vs high culture, isn't there something troubling about stagnation? About the notion that all of the maturation and life experiences you have after you're 15 years old have no influence on the kinds of stories you seek out when you're 35 or 50? That love and loss and marriage and childrearing and all the complex human drama you witness around you doesn't render many of the stories you loved when you were 15 facile and simplistic?</blockquote>