The epitome of true, tragic romance, or a couple of monsters ... Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes in Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

One of my favourite things about this blog has to be the recommendations that turn it into a kind of inventory of lost and obscure classics. Over the past six months, for example, I've enjoyed Newton Thornberg's Cutter and Bone (thanks, chriswiegand), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (thanks, SarahCrown), Jim Dodge's Fup (thanks, KirstinB) - Fup particularly, to the extent that six friends have since received it as a birthday present.

But not all the recommendations have been quite so successful. After a couple of glowing posts a while back I picked up Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Being a bit of a sucker for children's books, I was excited at the prospect of five whole new reads - "classics", no less - I'd never heard of.

Unfortunately that excitement didn't last much beyond the opening of the first one. Try as I might, the Cooper books just didn't do it for me. It might have been the writing (clumsy and portentous); it might have been the fact that any "Dark" that can be beaten back by an 11-year-old just isn't that chilling ... Or perhaps I'm just too old, and the Cooper sequence is of the non-crossover variety that only works for (i) children, or (ii) adults who read them when they were little and use them as a portal back into their own childhood.

It was that last point, anyway - specifically, that I'm past it - that got me wondering about books in general, and whether there are some books for adults as well as children that are best appreciated at a certain age.

Take Wuthering Heights. When I first read it, at 17 or 18, I absolutely loved it. I remember missing my bus stop, in fact, because I couldn't bear breaking up the reading of the ending. Cathy and Heathcliff's wild ways and blighted passion seemed to me the epitome of - well, true, tragic romance.

I reread it a month or so ago, and while it would be taking it a bit far to call it a disappointment (I was amazed afresh, for instance, by the fact that such a dark, dense read is constructed out of such springy language), it simply didn't have the same effect on me. Heathcliff and Cathy, to my older, cynical eyes, seemed less like romantic role models than selfish, appallingly behaved monsters. The only way I could manage their exploits was to read them less as people than as ciphers for elemental passions - and while this might have spurred a more thoughtful reading, it also removed the fervour and high feeling that, arguably, give the novel its power.

I've experienced a similar problem, too, with Kerouac's On The Road. When I read On The Road the first time around - again, at 17 or 18 - I can't begin to describe the effect that it had on me. There I was, bored, chafing at the bit, furious at all the staid adults I could see around me (washing-up, mortgages and pension plans); and there, suddenly, was this book, a great rallying cry that said fuck off and goodbye to all that.

I reread On The Road a couple of months back, after a visit to California. I still love the writing, and I still admire Kerouac and his friends' steady refusal to buckle down to a hangdog, nine-to-five lifestyle. But again, like Wuthering Heights, it just didn't have its previous effect. I suppose the problem with On The Road is that, when I was 18, it blew open the doors. Doors, however - assuming that they stay open, and mine (I hope) did - can only be blown open once.

Perhaps it isn't all one way traffic, though. Just as there are books that we can only fully "get" (or "feel") when we're younger, maybe there are some that work better when we're older. A friend flagged up Philip Roth as a good example - and Roth's Everyman specifically, a meditation on death which is potent at any age, but must become almost unbearably powerful if you're around the same age as the protagonist (71). Now there's something to look forward to.