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

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

"the lessons I learn sting a lot more when they're recent, and what's left years later is just the memory of that.
"

That's an excellent point.

"I first noticed this when re-reading and re-re-reading stuff I wrote when I was a kid."

Well, that I can totally relate to. I've been writing stories since I was four years old, and my parents saved a lot of my writings to give back to me when I was older. On the one hand, it's always fascinating to contrast my output from kindergarten with my junior high or high school output. On the other, it can be a little withering. For instance:

I finished my first novel when I was eleven. It was about a man who is blinded in an accident and loses his job and his fiancee and all his friends and decides to kill himself. Fortuitously, just as he's preparing to die, he meets some other people with disabilities and gets comfortable with his blindness, gets a new job, new friends, a new fiancee, etc., and life is good for him again. At the end, he goes back to the doctor a year later and is informed they can cure his blindness with surgery, to which he replies something like, "No, I want to stay blind. Being blind has made me see." Thus the book's title, "Blind Justice."

I was really proud of it when I wrote it, and as an adult, I've had people assure me it's a hoot and a half and that I should turn it into a farce, but... ouch. Just looking at it makes me blush. =)