Stuff you thought was profound

[mmcirvin]

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.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I just thought of a whole category of books I liked and find embarrassing in retrospect: nonfiction books by crackpots who, at the time, I did not realize were crackpots. The worst of this happened in late childhood and early adolescence, when I was casting about wildly for brain food. I was a big fan of Erich von Däniken in elementary school and honestly thought he was on to something; and once I remember reading an anti-environmentalist polemic by Petr Beckmann that I thought was pretty interesting.

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.

[jwgh]

Man, I so wanted to believe I was psychic as a kid! I think I read some sort of kooky Time-Life books on the subject, and at some point I picked up the encyclopedic Directory of Possibilities by Colin Wilson and John Grant, which was a sympathetic and open-minded look at all sorts of stuff (orgone boxes and ghosts and white holes and the big bang vs. steady state theory and kirlian photography and extraterrestrial life and bigfoot and dowsing and ...). I read it cover to cover and spent a certain amount of time trying to predict the order of cards in a shuffled deck, but I never got any results. I'm not sure at what point I stopped thinking that a lot of that stuff might actually be true. Actually, Douglas Hofstadter's skeptical tendencies may have been an influence here, thinking about it -- both his own skepticism and his recommendation of other skeptical writers.

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.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The von Däniken interest was something I mostly got from my grandfather, who was a true believer and wowed me with his tale of the detailed description of an extraterrestrial landing vehicle in the book of Ezekiel. I later read the text closely, and just couldn't see how you got from a flying wagon with wheels covered with eyeballs, ridden by angels with multiple animal heads, to something that made technical sense as an alien spaceship.