A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

I seem to remember that when I read Wrinkle as a kid I thought it was fabulous, brilliant, gripping. I'm really not sure what I thought was so great about it. Perhaps it's a book for kids, and its appeal doesn't reach forward over the generations as one ages. I don't know. Anyways, on this re-reading, 20 years later, I found it plodding and inscrutable, preachy, and overly pseudo-intellectual. The characters were hard to like. The story was hard to follow - or at least, hard to want to follow. Perhaps I need to read the other 78 books in the series to justify why they wanted to go this peculiar planet to begin with. There's no apparent motivation for It, or for the bizarre planet It runs, nor is there any particular motivation to save the cardboard-cutout people from It's reign.

Granted, many, many people I know tell me that this is one of the most brilliant books ever written, and that I'm just being obtuse. However, I'm pretty sure that most of them read it when they were 20 years younger than they are now.