I read it last year and enjoyed it! I liked it so well I then read Doctor Zhivago, twice!
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant book. But it is the kind of book I’d put in with James Joyce’s Ulysses, or Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy. Which I was reading by age 11... These days you wouldn’t expect many people under 18 to have read even one of those books let alone all of them, unless they were studying English Literature.
A lot of kids these days just don’t read even children’s books, sadly. Teenage and Young Adult targeted fiction these days is far simpler and far less gritty than the stuff I was reading at age 9 (having already consumed pretty much everything in the Children’s section of Dad’s library - which was vast. It included Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Michael Ballantyne, Johann R Wyss, Capt. WE Johns, Edith Nesbit, CS Lewis, Jules Verne, Kenneth Grahame, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, Erich Kästner, Arthur Ransome, Richmal Crompton and Charles Kingsley.)
I’m still depressed at the fact most young adults don’t even seem to know that “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is the first book out of 14 in L. Frank Baum’s series; or that “The Magician’s Nephew” is the second Narnia book, and the prequel/origin story for “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”.
How many people know that the most well-known Peter Pan adaptations are actually based on one of the later books in a series (”Peter and Wendy”) and the first book included Peter’s origin (”Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens”)?
There’s a Reading Age of 7 version of War and Peace. But There’s also Enid Blyton’s “The Land of Far-Beyond” which is a children’s book that retells A Pilgrim’s Progress. I’d actually be impressed if the average 16 year old had even read those versions, let alone the original books.