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

[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.