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

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

If there were any books I liked when I was younger that I would be really embarrassed about now, I've managed to erase them from my memory. Well, except for Donald Duck comics, those were just shit and I did like them. Most other comics I liked still stand up to scrutiny today.

I did like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series a lot, and nowadays I have some trouble with that because they're full of the kind of magical elitism I've come to really dislike, but I still think they're very well-written books, for being YA stuff.

Which reminds me: Hey, fantasy authors, cut it out with the following:

1) Good vs. Evil. I'm thoroughly sick of it.
2) Magical elitism. I don't want to hear another thing about people who are BETTER than everyone else because they can use MAGIC, yet they still stoop so low as to HELP those far inferior to them because they're JUST THAT GOOD.

Not that I actually read any fantasy. Because, 1) and 2).

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

1) Good vs. Evil. I'm thoroughly sick of it.

I'm not sick of it per se, but I'm sick of it being done badly.

2) Magical elitism. I don't want to hear another thing about people who are BETTER than everyone else because they can use MAGIC, yet they still stoop so low as to HELP those far inferior to them because they're JUST THAT GOOD.

I'm working on something right now that involves magic as just another area of academic study. OTOH, in this imagined universe, one would no more check out a grimoire to a random student than one would allow an undergrad in Physics 101 to play around with a high energy particle accelerator.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I'll accept good-versus-evil stories as soon as someone shows me a person who would actually place their own actions in the "evil" half of the division. And who isn't a bored teenager.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

No, seriously. The Mayor, who remains one of my most favorite villains ever, is unabashedly evil. Best bad guy that series ever had, because he was human (well, at first).

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I mean a real person.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Ah, I misunderstood. A good point, that. Although the really good (in the sense of being good stories, anyway) good-vs-evil stories that I've read don't rely on the source of evil being human, but rather some natural or supernatural force.

Whether one in turn buys that depends on one's proclivities (sort of like what my dad, who trained as a physicist, said about the Age of Unreason series: "As long as you buy the central conceit, it's great").