When Books Could Change Your Life: Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do

There’s something alarming about this. I don’t want to believe that our personalities ossify so much in adulthood that we’re no longer capable of being changed by art. But part of the reason art loses its power over us, of course, is, simply and sadly, that we get old; our personalities, as soft, impressionable, and tempting as freshly poured sidewalk cement when young, gradually set and harden over the years with whatever graffiti passers-by scrawled there still indelibly inscribed in it. But when a 14-year-old gushes that the Twilight series are the best books she’s ever read in her whole life, it’s easy for grownups to forget that this is not necessarily hyperbole. At that age, we haven’t heard any clichés, and even dumb ideas are new.

(via fluffah via the Radar)