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.

Crackpots for kids!

Though there were cranky books that I failed to recognize as such as a child, I'm also proud to say that there were some that I caught. I remember vividly a week spent at a hotel in Virginia Beach with my family around 1978 or '79. My mother bought me a couple of books to read on the trip. At the time I was mostly interested in science popularizations, so she got me the excellent Einstein's Universe by Nigel Calder (the companion to the Peter Ustinov TV series), a book I'd still happily recommend to anyone who wants to learn something about the theory of relativity; and the unfortunate Black Holes by honest-to-God mathematical physicist and way-out dude John G. Taylor.

Taylor decided that the metaphysical shock of actually reading about the horror of black holes was too much for the average man in the street to withstand unprepared, so he spent the entire first half of the book building up to it by rambling on about anything else that crossed his mind, including the reality of psychic powers, ancient astronauts, life after death, and the possibility of disembodied souls surviving the destruction of the universe, all of which he believed in.

The most surprising statement in this half of the book, surprising because it turned out to be true, was that Carl Sagan once proposed an ancient-astronauts hypothesis. (You can look it up: it's in Sagan and Shklovskii's Intelligent Life in the Universe, and I think it's in one of the bits that young Carl Sagan wrote. He thought that the Sumerian god Oannes, represented as a sort of bipedal fish-man who taught men language, might have been an alien. I don't think Sagan ever took the hypothesis all that seriously, though: more than anything else he displayed it as an example of how von Däniken types might go about framing their hypotheses more plausibly.)

Then the second half of Black Holes actually was about black holes, and had some correct information in it as far as it went, but this other sensational and cranky stuff kept leaking into it. For instance, at one point he spoke of the possibility of making a "naked singularity", that is, a singularity in space-time not hidden by an event horizon. Just what a naked singularity might do is a bit of a mystery; current physical theory can't predict what might pop out of it. Taylor chose this moment to wax Lovecraftian, and decided that the horrifying mystery of the total breakdown of known physical law would cause any beholder to go insane. He then came up with a pulpy scenario about a mad scientist who holds the world hostage by threatening the make a naked singularity, whose public eldritchity would cause all men to run mad in the streets the moment its existence became known.

Not much of this impressed me, and I lost track of the paperback years later. But I could never find anyone else who had actually read this book (there was a much more popular book called Black Holes that came out around the same time, written by somebody else) until I read a scathing review of it by Martin Gardner many years later, and was happy to find that I had not imagined the whole thing.

As Paul Simon might say, when I look back on all the crap I read in childhood, it's a wonder I can think at all. (Though the brand-new camera I took to Virginia Beach was not loaded with Kodachrome; it was a Polaroid One-Step.) Still, I think my parents did right by me when they exposed me to some of this; it ultimately served as a sort of mental inoculation, because I had eventually come to decide on the basis of my own research and reasoning what was probably nonsense, instead of just taking it from them. Indeed, I eventually became much more of a skeptic about paranormal things than they are.