The Nostalgia Project

It’s pretty common for us as bloggers (and avid readers) to go back and reread books to see if they still “hold up.” Are your old favorites from high school still good now that you’re no longer in high school? How much have your reading tastes changed since then? Do you have a lower tolerance for some plots or character traits now than you did back then? Within the past few months, I’ve been itching to revisit some of my old favorite series, books, and authors to see how much I still enjoy (or maybe not enjoy) them and their style. I thought I would share my little project with everyone and see what their thoughts are. Maybe it’ll be interesting for you too!

I know plenty of bloggers that didn’t really read much when they were younger, but that was not me. I inherited my love of reading from my parents and that continued throughout my life. I did have specific reading processes and genres that I followed when I was a young adult, which have since changed in some ways.

As you can tell, my general book-buying process has changed a lot. I read the same kind of books (young adult) but have strayed away from some of the cliche books that were popular around 2008-9. I vividly remember googling release dates for the books I was anxiously awaiting and writing them on my little whiteboard to keep track. It was wonderful for a while because it seemed like with the insanely long series I was reading, I was able to grab a new book every month. It’s interesting to see what series I ended up finishing. This project won’t include Pretty Little Liars because even though it was arguably the most important series out of all of these (for me personally), I just finished it last year. I don’t feel the need to revisit it quite yet.67% of those series aren’t finished yet! Even less (50%) of the spinoff series are finished either. (I honestly don’t remember if I ever finished The A-List: Hollywood Royalty series…)

I’m interesting to investigate some of these books again and figure out why I dropped them, if I still even like the books I’ve already read, and just how much my tastes have changed.

This will be an ongoing, indefinite project. I’m not going to force myself to read a book off of this list every month or anything like that. I think it will just carry on organically and spice up the blog whenever it happens. I am currently finishing up the Gallagher Girls series right now, so that will probably be the first Nostalgia Project review and analysis by the end of the year. The rest is up in the air! Here’s my general plan of attack…

1. Reread and/or casually revisit some old favorites.

I can guarantee right now that I probably won’t reread all of the books above. First of all, they’re all HUGE series. Second of all, I can kind of already tell how I’m going to feel about them upon revisiting. Here’s a breakdown of what I anticipate will happen and my status on each series:

As I said, I don’t think I’ll reread or revisit all of these books… but who knows. Some of them need to be finished off still, and I do think I’ll finish all of those ones. For longer series, I’ll probably seek some recaps online or refresh my memory by flipping through the books. For shorter series, I’ll just reread them. It’s hard to imagine rereading a 10 or 14 book series that I already finished though.

2. Compare my initial ratings & reactions to how I feel now.

Once I decide which books I’m actually going to work with, I’ll be able to compare how I felt during high school and how I feel now. Even after finishing just one Zoey Dean book this week, I can already tell how much my tastes have changed. I did generally enjoy the book, but if I had never read that author before and didn’t already appreciate their work (for nostalgic purposes, mostly), then I probably would have rated it much lower.

3. Consider the implications of my current age, culture when the books were released vs. today, etc.

I know that it’s a totally different experience to read YA books now as a 24 year old. My life experiences allow me to read these books from a different perspective. How did the books make me feel in high school because I was the same age as the main character? How do they make me feel now that I’m older? I also want to think about what culture was like back in the publishing year of these books compared to 2015. I think things are a lot different. Slut-shaming was not even a term I knew of at 16 years old; now I think about it all the time!

4. Draw conclusions and compare to current YA faves.

I’m curious to see how this all pans out. I know that there will always be a BIT of bias for these books since I loved them so much back in the day. I’ve talked about how important Pretty Little Liars was to keep me reading through college, even though the books dragged on for a long time. I definitely let my heart get in the way of a solid rating sometimes. In any case, I do also want to compare these books and their themes/characters to today’s YA. I think there will be some major differences to explore!

Currently revisiting

Series I am currently working on:

Completed series

Click on the images below to see the reviews and revisits I’ve done so far: