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Author Kevin Smokler spent a year going back through books he read in high school to see what they would mean to him now as an adult. He compiles his experiences in his book "Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven't Touched Since High School."

Your views of the books change when you aren't reading for a school assignment, he says. And while you've grown up, the book is still waiting for you, unchanged. 

"At the heart of Smokler's book, then, is the awareness that in high school — though anytime, really — we are too immersed in the process of formation to coherently make meaning from what our experiences are telling us," 

writes Brandon Bye for Fiction Writers Review

. "Only later, standing at the crossroads of memory's infirmity and history's insufficiency, can we adequately feel the charge of what Smokler calls a formative moment."

Going back to a book brings a new perspective to the classics, he says.

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Your views of the books change when you aren't reading it for a school assignment, says an author.

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