What are some books to read if I'm horribly obsessed with the magic of childhood to the point of near depression and am...

What are some books to read if I'm horribly obsessed with the magic of childhood to the point of near depression and am increasingly unable to handle my ever-growing disconnect with the Fairy Tale reality of youth
I've already read Grimm's Fairy Tales and they made me cry because there was a time when those things were almost real, or at least more real than they are now but that's gone now.

Catcher in the Rye

La recherche maybe? Idk

Read John Green, being unironic here. Though he's mostly fantasizing about highschool girls & all the blowjobs he never received and cereal

Narnia

Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine taps a deep vein of nostalgia for childhood.

Proust
Proust
Proust

just watch anime, m8

I know that La recherche du temps perdu basically deals with this theme but it's just so damn much I feel like I'll never finish it because I'm such a slow reader

Wordsworth, Recollections from Early Childhood

1.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

user don't do this to me it hurts too much

Then it's the only book you'll need, what's the problem?

The length is just daunting is all

Benjamin's essays on childhood.
Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (recurrent theme).

Check out the Fuentes short The Doll Queen

Then just read Swann's Way, it's only 400 pages, so barely longer than your typical novel. And the really good "ah, to be a child again!" stuff is right there in the first 50, so it's not like you'll have to wade through a ton of stuff to get to the part that you want to read. Seriously, go do it.

Karl Ove - Min Kamp book 3

Demian

Catcher in the Rye, ya phony

fpbp

Sounds to me like you need to study mythology, as well as analysis, of the Uroboric through Greatmother motifs. I recommend the first part (/half) of Erich Neumann's "Origins and History of Consciousness". The sooner you confront the fact you can't remain in the circular cradle of infantility and realize the detrimental restiction you impose on yourself for doing so, the better off you'll be in the long run. You must separate from the illusory utopia that matriarchal possession confers to you. You must individuate. Or you will never grow, you will never adapt to the world at large, and at some point you will be forcibly separated from such (as in the actual death of your parents) where then you'll literally be as an infant (psychologically) abandoned to the complex social order of actual functioning people, and you won't be suitably prepared nor have a proper sense of orientation to operate therein.

op, just want to say this is a great thread

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>saving thumbnails
dumb manchild

You don't need to suffer.

Peter Pan obviously

Nabokov's memoir Speak, Memory has some of this.

Stand by Me. Even though it's a meme, IT has segments that touch upon this too (whenever it's a 50s flashback and they're exploring in the creek).

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Not OP here

As a brainlet who's never really gotten into fiction but does feel the same way, is this proust novel collection (specifically the first one) going to be readable for me? Or should I start off reading some easier shit that'll jive with my reading level?

Proust is one of the greatest, might be difficult for the layman. He packs a lot of philosophical insight into beautiful prose, stuff like

>All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there — those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only — and still! — to fools.

And that's a somewhat random passage, there are so many good examples of incredible ethereal imagery and concepts he creates

Im very tired so some of this flew right over my head but some of this unironically made me think

Tolstoy's Childhood Boyhood Youth
Tonio Kroger