On the topic of books being worse than when you read them as a kid

By james_nicholl
It's a little known fact that if you let a childhood favourite pass unread for more than a few years, pixies sneak in and replace the books with inferior versions. The entire point of the Western Canon is to force school children to protect a small set of books from this process, both by ensuring that the books do not go unread for long enough for the crap pixies to replace than and by ensuring that no child enjoys them, thus removing the primary bait by which the pixies target books.