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

[jwgh]

A bunch of people seem to be ashamed of enjoying the Dr. Dolittle books. I remember reading a bunch of them as a kid but I don't remember anything particularly shameful about them -- my memory is that they were sort of Jules Vernesy in their way. I do remember there being a whole lot of them available at my local library.

I remember really liking 'The Sword of Shannara' by Terry Brooks, then rereading it years later and being appalled by how derivative it was and its atrocious writing. I also read a bunch of other Terry Brooks books, but gradually lost interest. (Towards the end of this process I remember reading that he was a lawyer and realizing that this probably could have been deduced from the plots of the last few books of his that I read.)

I agree with something that one or two people said in the discussion you linked to, which is that it's not all that embarassing to admit that you liked something that wasn't very good when you recognized that it wasn't very good when you read it in the first place -- the real embarassment comes from having genuinely thought that something was good which you now realize (or at least think) has no redeeming qualities. I therefore don't really mind that I used to read a lot of David Eddings, for instance.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I read Doc Smith's Lensman novels in high school, at the enthusiastic recommendation of friends, and was bothered by how crap they were (considering the author's inexplicable high esteem among classic SF novelists) but also bothered by the fact that I could not stop reading.

Later I found out that, considered in the proper context, they were less crap than they seemed and the adulation for Smith was somewhat deserved. The copyright pages said they were from the Fifties, by which standard they'd have been shockingly naive; but they were really from the Thirties, by an author who had gotten his start in science fiction earlier even than that (his first novel was from 1928). Suddenly all the cliches in them seemed like important innovations. Also, they'd been damaged somewhat in their transition from magazine serialization to novel series: the whole first volume was a minor unrelated novel that had been badly pasted into the Lensman future history, in a manner that also gave away a big chunk of the ending.

[jwgh]

Yes, Eddings was like that with me (but without the benefit of historical importance) -- with every book I would think to myself, "Why am I reading these?" and I could never come up with anything more satisfying than "Because I want to."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And today, I keep on reading Rudy Rucker's novels despite being perfectly aware of their enormous flaws. But obviously I'm getting something out of them.

[lots42.livejournal.com]

Some books are fun to read because of their flaws. I read Tinker mostly to discover which shockingly insane thing the heroine would do next.

The worst was not summoning anyone from either two loyal-to-her armies when a powerful man threatened her.