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Stuff you thought was profound
Various people discuss their teenage bookcase embarrassments—books that changed their whole worldview but seem like crap now. I've managed to avoid many of the books mentioned, though some were assigned to other people in high school. I did think Jonathan Livingston Seagull was kind of cool when I read it at, I don't know, the age of 10 or 11; I suspect it would make me queasy today. Earlier I said I might think the same way about Gravity's Rainbow, but I was just thumbing through it in a bookstore the other day and the prose was still grabbing me. Didn't get the urge to reread it from the beginning, though.
It occurs to me that much of my teenage boookshelf was abandoned in the course of various moves from one place to another (my parents tried hard to counter my packrat tendencies), so I don't personally have many of those books any more in order to be embarrassed by them. I do think I have a more forgiving attitude than those people do toward the books that really kicked me in the head in my youth. If I went back and re-read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach now, it would be with a more skeptical eye and I'd be asking myself how relevant all of Hofstadter's manic intellectual cross-connections really were—and, of course, he made various predictions about the future which have in some cases turned out to be wrong. But I think I'd also remember how profound an effect the book had on my adolescent mental development, and it would be impossible to hate it.
I thought William Gibson's Neuromancer was stupendously awesome when I read it back in the eighties. Of course, a lot of people did. Now I probably would find that fact a little embarrassing; but, on the other hand, I'd also try to remember what it was like to read it at the time it came out, and look for what was good in it that made it so appealing, which I suspect was actually a lot.
The books that I liked as a teenager but really wouldn't today are, I think, more the ones that I had to give the benefit of the doubt back then, because everyone kept telling me they were so brilliant. For instance, I remember liking The Catcher in the Rye, but it was an at-arm's-length sort of like; I didn't immediately sympathize with Holden Caulfield the way I did with, say, Huckleberry Finn, or Trurl and Klapaucius.
I never really saw the appeal of Camus.
It occurs to me that much of my teenage boookshelf was abandoned in the course of various moves from one place to another (my parents tried hard to counter my packrat tendencies), so I don't personally have many of those books any more in order to be embarrassed by them. I do think I have a more forgiving attitude than those people do toward the books that really kicked me in the head in my youth. If I went back and re-read Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach now, it would be with a more skeptical eye and I'd be asking myself how relevant all of Hofstadter's manic intellectual cross-connections really were—and, of course, he made various predictions about the future which have in some cases turned out to be wrong. But I think I'd also remember how profound an effect the book had on my adolescent mental development, and it would be impossible to hate it.
I thought William Gibson's Neuromancer was stupendously awesome when I read it back in the eighties. Of course, a lot of people did. Now I probably would find that fact a little embarrassing; but, on the other hand, I'd also try to remember what it was like to read it at the time it came out, and look for what was good in it that made it so appealing, which I suspect was actually a lot.
The books that I liked as a teenager but really wouldn't today are, I think, more the ones that I had to give the benefit of the doubt back then, because everyone kept telling me they were so brilliant. For instance, I remember liking The Catcher in the Rye, but it was an at-arm's-length sort of like; I didn't immediately sympathize with Holden Caulfield the way I did with, say, Huckleberry Finn, or Trurl and Klapaucius.
I never really saw the appeal of Camus.
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I read a few Camus books. The only one that really grabbed me was The Plague, which I liked a lot. (Haven't read it in a while ...) I even tried to read a book of his essays, but I don't think I ever made it through them. (Which is pretty rare -- I only very slowly came to realize that just because you started a read a book doesn't mean you have to finish reading it. For a long time this never really occurred to me, even if I was reading a book I really disliked. I still have some tendencies in this direction.)
Most of my embarassing recollections come out of that, actually -- just the sheer amount of time spent reading books basically just to pass the time. None of the seven trillion Piers Anthony books I read in junior and senior high school changed my life forever, but, geez, there's a lot of hours there I'll never have back.
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Ah yes. I remember the glorious day walking into a Waldenbooks and there being a new Xanth novel out (having read every single one up until that point). I stood and looked at it for a couple minutes, rolling it over in my hand, reading and rereading the back cover, before realizing, "Wow... I just don't give a shit," and moved on to find something else.
And yeah, I fell for Catcher in the Rye hook line and sinker my junior year, though I did think the protagonist was an idiot.
-- Schwa ---
On the subject of embarrassments
If you haven't heard of the show, it could be because it premiered yesterday-- Friday 3PM eastern, Noon Pacific-- and the audio's available online. In fact, the WNYC webnerds are pretty frighteningly efficient, as the audio was up within minutes of the show airing. Flansburgh calls it "an hour-long exploration into the ever-expanding universe of popular music."
Re: On the subject of embarrassments
Fortunately they have transcripts. Giving Flansburgh a radio show is a thing of which I heartily approve.
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It's worth it, if only to hear Flans channel cheap trick. Also, by the way, WNYC's stream is .asx, not Real, so you can probably patch something together in order to record if not listen to it come next Friday.
Re: On the subject of embarrassments
Hidden treasure: David Amram, "Rondo A La Turca" from Triple Concerto. As mentioned before.
Strangely, both of these are from the 1970s.
Re: On the subject of embarrassments
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What's really funny is the journals I kept, mostly around 16 and 21. The 16 ones are so misguided and floundering, but the 21 are funny to read because they chronicle the development of my adult personality and the first stumbling across the ideas I hold now. It's funny to read how excited I was when I first found out about them.
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But the king-hell primary embarrassment of them all was my teenage fondness for Fred Alan Wolf's Taking the Quantum Leap, which actually won a National Book Award. It was my introduction to the wonders of quantum mechanics, and I'd still call it a nice, non-threatening introduction to the subject, were so many of the statements in it not flat-out wrong and dangerously misleading. I remember finding some of the later chapters frustratingly mystical and obscure, and assumed that I just needed to learn more about the subject and they would become clear. I now realize that Wolf was talking complete bollocks and trying to lead the reader toward believing that quantum effects were responsible for psychic powers and religious experiences.
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Incidentally, Ira Glass had a youthful fascination with Erich von Däniken. This apparently led to some interesting discussions at the Baltimore Hebrew College, which he went to three days a week as a teenager.
There was a copy of Chariots of the Gods around in the house when I was growing up, but I don't think I ever read it.
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I spent much of my time as a teenager reading and re-reading the Hitchhiker's Trilogy. I'm currently reading the books again (as an adult) and finding them to be much more intelligent, with satiric relevance as opposed to silliness for the sake of sillines, and even some poignant moments. I'm torqued that there isn't a strong female character (no, Trillian doesn't count as a decent character), but I'm somewhat resigned to the fact that no sci-fi will ever have a female character that is not defined exclusively by her gender. Grr! Rarr!
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There's a bit of a catch-22, in that people writing female characters who don't act stereotypically girly are accused of writing them as "men in disguise". And for many decades, any story with a strong female character in it, even (perhaps especially) if it was by a woman, was going to have to be a feminist issue story in which the character was reacting to stereotypes, thus defining her by her gender in that way (see Joanna Russ): perhaps a worthy effort, but constrained. Ursula Le Guin is a good example of a writer who concentrated on that at one time, but then, I think, largely evolved beyond it.
There are people who never learn. In the last interview I read about the subject with Stanislaw Lem, he said that his straight SF was often devoid of female characters because introducing them would automatically introduce a sexual element that would be extraneous to the story. It's a strange, old notion, which I've heard propounded elsewhere: that men are sort of the default sex, and sex itself is associated inextricably with the presence of women, so you can eliminate it by eliminating the female characters. (I guess Lem never read any Samuel R. Delany.)
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One embarrassing reading habit I had was between the ages of 10 and 13, I read just about every single Robert Heinlein book. Now I look back with disgust at his sexism, for one thing, but at the time, his books were fascinating (although not as much as others I was reading at the time, like Asimov, Clarke, LeGuin, MZB, Niven, even Harlan Ellison, despite his problems).
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In some ways Heinlein was actually ahead of his time in depicting female characters, in that he was willing relatively early on to write the hypercompetent female action superhero of the sort we've been seeing so often over the past few years. But it was usually tempered by something of the traditional gender-role notion of the time—that disappointing ending to "The Menace from Earth," just to take the most famous example.
And later on, his obsessive fantasies about being serviced by sexy, sassy girl-women in his dotage just completely took over, and there was nobody there to give it the red pencil.
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I've not yet read CitR, and i fear that doing so now will make me itch. But i'll just have to do it.
I can't think of many books that changed my Weltanschauung. Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun really seemed to turn me into a pacifist — but then i became interested in joining the Air Force ROTC, so long as i could get money for it. Then i enrolled in USC and the pervasive laziness that has been a part of my life, but especially defined my college career, chased away any notion of becoming part of a fascist organization that would demand my timely and early arrival — i stayed up all night foolin' around on this crazy Internet thing, i needed my sleep!
JLS is hokey. I re-read Siddhartha about a year ago and i enjoyed it just as much as i did in college.
You definitely don't strike me as a Camus kind of guy. I thought The Stranger was pretty darn cool, but, again, it didn't change me. One book that i had to read in my junior year was Khalil Gibran's "The Madman"; upon reflection, that was the first book i ever read that significantly stretched my brain in ways that i found painful, yet slowly made some sort of sense, as an echo in my head. Haven't re-read it, but i should (even though i fear that it might prove merely amusing to my now-jaded 31yo self).