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]

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."