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

[lots42.livejournal.com]

I'm not embarassed to read Card. I'm embarassed FOR Card. He took a great book 'Ender's Game' and just pissed all over it.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

There was a big thread elsewhere about authors who have pissed on their great books with sequels. Some people mentioned LeGuin with her Earthsea books, although i don't recall the specifics (and, of course, i've not read them).

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Maybe they didn't care for Tehanu, which was written years after the Earthsea trilogy and is substantially different?

I dunno, I remember liking it. It's been awhile since I read it though.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's the one. I kept thinking "Tehama".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of the Earthsea books, but I do remember reading somewhere that Le Guin had come to dislike some of the choices she had made when writing them and wrote Tehanu with the conscious intent of subverting them. I can imagine a big fan of the original books not liking that at all.