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]

What I usually hear about Anthony is that to extract enjoyment from his books you want to start at the beginning of one of his endless series, read them in order, and the moment you stop having fun, just put the book down and walk away, because they're not going to get any better.

As I happened, I followed that advice: I started reading "Split Infinity" (the first one in the Apprentice Adept series of SF/fantasy crossovers), came away thinking "Eh", and never read any more.

But people keep telling me that his first novel "Macroscope" was really very good.

[jwgh]

Harlan Ellison wrote a nice tribute to him at the beginning of Dangerous Visions, I think.

[astrange.livejournal.com]

Piers Anthony books seem to be completely random with regards to quality. I've read at least one book of his (though I've completely forgotten the title) which had less engaging writing than Watch Your Brain does. And Xanth has gone completely unreadable even if you are 13, unless you don't mind reading books made entirely out of reader-submitted puns. Somewhere in between there and the first Xanth books (which were just sort of boring), he did manage to produce a few that I still think are actually good. The only example I can think of immediately is Castle Roogna, though.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

Good advice. I actually experienced embarassment over books I used to like while reading Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series as a teen. The first book was terribly good, I thought, despite the fact that I don't really remember it. By the time I got to the fifth book I was embarassed that I'd ever liked Anthony, especially with his "author's notes" that involved him wigging out because fans drive by his house and chastized him for not mowing often enough. It was a lot like Usenet, now that I think about it.

Other than that, I may have grown out of a lot of books, but I'm not embarassed that I used to like them. Not even those stupid adventure novels written by men as an excuse for softcore sex scenes. Those were popular when I was a teenager. I WILL NOT BE EMBARASSED.

What embarasses me are old writings and reports. Stuff I thought was terrific seems so pedestrian now, and it irks me when I remember teachers who encouraged these things. Did they think what I wrote was great for a 20 year old, or did they think it was great on any level? Because it's not great. And they may be really terrible professors if they thought it was great research.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Sometimes grading student papers is kind of like reading slushpile submissions: most of them are so mind-bendingly awful that when you find one that's actually mediocre you want to kiss it.