At BuzzFeed Books, Anne Helen Petersen expresses nostalgia for the reading she did as a teenager. It’s not so much that she misses the books themselves, though, but rather the “style of reading” associated with being a teen, the kind of full immersion that one isn’t able to achieve as an adult:
As adults, we’re taught to avoid that sort of reading—that sort of envelopment—because it makes us irresponsible. Bad parents, bad housekeepers, bad employees. The ability to be “bad” at the bigger (and often somewhat boring) things in life, simply because a book has consumed you—that’s what I miss about being a teen, and the sort of reading that accompanied it.
