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]

I don't know... I think the situation with regard to female characters in SF has actually gotten a lot better at the literary high end over the past 30 years or so, especially from some female authors such as, say, Nancy Kress and Connie Willis (just to name a couple off the top of my head), but also from some male ones, though somebody is always going to accuse them of getting it wrong.

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.)

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Great points, esp. about LeGuin.

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).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Heinlein's complicated, with regard to sex as well as everything else. To me it seems as if he underwent one and maybe two abrupt changes in style over the course of his career, but it may just have been because editors were less willing to edit him as he became famous.

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.