More teenage bookcase embarrassments

[mmcirvin]

Crooked Timber has a thread up on the ever-popular subject of books you're embarrassed to have loved, as discussed here over a year ago.

What's striking is that the same names keep coming up over and over: Erich von Däniken, Richard Bach, Ayn Rand, Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein (though several people point out that the shame with Heinlein is not to enjoy his work but to take him as your personal guru). And Jake even mentioned Colin Wilson in a very different context.

Somebody quoted Ursula Le Guin as saying that kids might like junk but no kid is dumb enough to like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Wrong.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I like Kessel's essay (haven't read Radford's), but it's also important to observe that this sort of special-bullied-kid-revenge fantasy does not begin with Card but runs through the whole history of the SF genre. I think it's the basis of the whole Odd John/Slan/Tomorrow People subgenre of stories about misfit super-mutants (particularly common in YA stories).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...In fact, I seem to recall Phil Dick saying at some point that it seriously creeped him out, and he tried not to write stories like that. When he wrote misfit super-mutants they were usually villains.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Slans, that is, not Ender (I think Dick was dead by the time "Ender's Game" came out).