What we should have known

I don't believe in the narrative of my childhood. By that, I mean, I don't trust my recollections. It seems equally possible that I sprang fully formed into early adulthood as it does that I was once small and open to the possibilities of the world. Only my raging disappointments tether me to the belief that I must have once been a child. It is the only way to explain my anger. I keep thinking about SXR's brilliant line, "mourn the lost years". From mourning, it is a short hop to regret and a quick trip to things-i-wish-i-had-known-then.

I wish I had read Tropic of Cancer sooner, perhaps around age 13. And Bukowski - all of him. I am glad I fell in love with Henry David Thoreau when I did. I found Salinger at just the right time. I tried too hard with Nietzsche - it was a time when I was an acolyte in the cult of precocity. Instead of Nietzsche in college, I wish I had read Marx and Emerson. I wish someone had said to me, as a proto-freshman in college when I was a very young 17 years old, "check out the European Philosophers and if that interests you, you may find value in the lingua franca of American legal thought." It never occurred to me that there was a great tradition, equal to the French novel, an intense tradition around the law and theorizing around it. That the law celebrates precise language - the power of words. I am on the fence about Twain. I enjoyed him in school. I love him now. Vonnegut too.

Do books find you when you need them? Is there a difference between
assigned reading and found reading? What do you wish you had known?
What do you wish you had found and when?