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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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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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