Reverse Humiliation

I’ll confess to having had a strange love for Robert Heinlein books- the Lazarus Long ones especially. That might not be so embarrassing except that I largely liked them for what I took to be deep insights in to philosophical questions.

Piers Anthony. Hands down. Between the ages of 12 and 14 I read ever scrap of drivel he ever produced. I wish I had had a scifi/fantasy guru to direct me to something more worthwhile. Heinlein would have been far better.

Why is it all Science Fiction? Mine is the Ender series, by Orson Scott Card. I’m not sure that ANY teenage obsession wouldn’t be embarrasing–at least Heinlein and Piers Anthony have sex in them, which is entirely appropriate for teenagers. Ender doesn’t get laid until (spoiler!) long after he commits genocide.

T. Lobsang Rampa: The Third Eye et seq
Mysterious psychic powers, the importance of regular bowel movements and communicating with your cat.

Turned out it was a plumber’s son from Devon.

Not really embarrassed by the books I liked–I mean, I read Heinlein and Piers Anthony and all manner a crap, but as far as I recollect I recognized its crappiness at the time…not that there’s anything wrong with that stuff….

But if I can mention music instead a books…at one time I was convinced Joan Baez’s “Diamonds an Rust” album was the work of the greatest female singer of modern times (–that Billie Holiday–what a fraud!). The memory is still painful.

Forced to pick a book I’d go with the Foundation Trilogy. Fine stories. Maybe not as profound as I thought at the time.

AHAHAHA, Piers Anthony! Ayyyup, that’d be mine too. And here I’d almost forgot about him.

I admit—as a 13-year-old, I didn’t see anything wrong with a fixation on 13-year-old girls. Three years later, not so much. Ack.

I feel no embarrassment confessing my fondness for the Dr. Doolittle books. We had dogs, cats and rats as pets. In one fashion or another we managed to communicate. Nancy Drew is another matter…

As a child I was inordinately fond of Johnny Tremain, and I remain a fan of three-cornered hats and the eighteenth century in general. When I encounter one of Houdon’s merry busts of Diderot I want to kiss the tip of his nose. Ah, the Enlightenment, l’esprit de l’escalier. It seems so far away from the war on Christmas Terror.

Pre-teen and teen I was reading Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov. I’d still recommend them to anyone who hasn’t read them. I’ve never gone back to Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and I doubt I’d recommend The Interpretation of Dreams, but Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious is essential. “Life is like a suspension bridge.” “What do you mean?” “How should I know?” Priceless.

I’m embarrassed to say that I feel no embarrassment at all about any of the books I liked as a teenager, not even G.A. Henty. But, in response to Vance, I can’t understand anti-Narniaism. The Narnia books are _fantastic_ , notwithstanding the religious not-very-subtext.

Ah, maybe not enough said — FF were pre-teen guity pleasures for me. Hardy Boys, then?

Nancy Drew was and remains cool.

Biggles – until I finally noticed that all the villains were either Huns or “swarthy”.

The Affluent Society.

Believed every word of it.

Soooo embarrassing.

Did I miss the mention of Anne McAffrey? It must be there. It’s a law.

I didn’t idolize her Pern books, but I was certainly addicted to them when I was thirteen or so. I didn’t realize until I tried to reread them years later that they were full of misogyny and homophobia in addition to just plain bad writing. Now I cringe whenever I think of them.

I like the rest of McLemee’s article. The BTK guy a possible Wilson fan, who knew?

There’s nothing wrong with liking this sort of stuff when you’re a teen. What, we emerge into adolescence with mature critical sensibilities? It’s like the mumps. Get over it while you’re young, so you won’t be rendered sterile by it as an adult.

On the other hand, the forty-something man who thinks Piers Anthony is the hottest thing since microwave burritos, and finds no fault at all in Anthony’s fixation on 13-year-old girls… him, I would worry about.

I have far too many to list since I would read anything I could get my hands on. I was obsessed with my share of sci-fi: Stephen Donaldson and Frank Herbert. Then there was the World War II series by Herman Wouk, Winds of War wasn’t it?

Mostly Heinlein, who led me into a mercifully brief flirtation with several rather discreditable schools of conservative political and economic thought, much to the chagrin of my leftist parents. It ended with two books: Friday, whose ending was such pure, utter, hopeless crap that even at 15 I knew Heinlein had absolutely no relevance to the real world; and Neuromancer, which totally changed the way I read SF by doing away with self-congradulatory rocket fantasies altogether. After that Heinlein seemed pretty lame.

The other shameful favourites I read as a teenager I kept well into adulthood.

How many of these embarrassments required rereadings? I mean, it’s possible I’d be embarrassed about reading Narnia, or Foundation, or the Camber of Culdi series, or any number of other things if I read them again as an adult, but I’m not planning to do so (partly because I’m afraid of the disappointment).

(The Horror! The Horror!)

ATLAS SHRUGGED

Enid Blyton for crying out loud. Sad.

I don’t see that having read von Daniken as a pre-teen is all that embarassing. I also consumed a great deal of von Daniken\UFOlogy\Bermuda Triangle stuff back in the day. Books in this genre are superficially plausible and really require more hard knowledge and a more advanced bullshit-detector than most kids (and a lot of adults, too, judging by the endless There Are Mysteries series on the Discovery Channel) possess. Chariots of the Gods pushes a lot of the same buttons as Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, after all, and it takes a while to acquire enough proficience to distinguish between the artist and the con-artist.

T. Lobsang Rampa, on the other hand …

Speaking of the 20-sided die: while I feel the pain of the Piers Anthony ex-fans, it seems like the worst of the worst were the straightforward D&D knockoffs–anyone remember Dragonlance? As close to factory-produced as fiction can get, I think. And not a shred of humor to cut the acrid taste that you get when you combine epic self-importance with unabashed cross-marketing.

I’m with Henry — most of this stuff isn’t really embarrassing. It’s just what teens and pre-teens read. You want embarrassing, I’ll give you embarrassing: I read nine, NINE, of John Norman’s Gor books.

MKK

The Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”. I’m now embarrassed that, as a teen, I actually believed we were all headed for disaster. The spectacular failure of all those dismal predictions over the decades since has been an eye-opener.

I think I had read too many science fiction books by the time I got to von Daniken. I figured he was just another fiction author who was using the “this really happened” trope. So I guess the embarassing thing is I didn’t realize he was serious until much later?

The Pern books were embarassing though. I read those at eight or so and then tried to read them later in my teens. They were really bad. I remember the first Xanth books being fun, but the punning got old by book three or so. I think I read them when I was thirteen or fourteen.

I still think Card can be fun. His world-building is interesting even if the Ender series got a bit didactic by the end. I remember really liking the Elric series at about 15. I wonder if that would stand up now.

There are numerous writers that I read five or more books by, and then, in the very middle of a book, I was plowing along nicely, enjoying it as I had enjoyed all the rest, and ALL OF A SUDDEN had an overwhelming realization that:

A) This book is the same as all of the author’s other books!

B) That means that the author has fraudulently fooled me into wasting hours of my time. I hate both this author and myself. How could I have been so stupid? I must throw this book away at once and ignore this writer forever.

This happened with:

R.L. Stine (c. age 11)

Robert Asprin (c. age 14)

Dave Barry (c. age 15)

M.C. Beaton (c. age 16)

P.J. O’Rourke (c. age 18)

I read stacks of terrible books, but I’ve no embarrassment about it because I was, well, a kid. Kids do stupid stuff.

I am mildly embarrassed at the extent of my aviation fixation when I was was about 12 to 15, in large part I can still tell the difference between a Spitfire V.B and V.C and can list the weaknesses and strengths of the F-4 Phantom in a second, and neither of those are conversation material for polite company.

How about Joseph Altsheler? Fifty (nearly) years later I wonder if there was much real history there or just a bunch of dubious attitude. At least I preferred the 18th-century ones to the Confederate sentimentality. Or maybe there was some real history in those and I just remember the sentimentality because I’m embarrassed by it.

I’m shocked that people are embarrassed by reading enid blyton. Read them to your kids, and you’ll understand the appeal (but only read one to them — it is like wading through treacle, without the nice smell).

One of my favorite authors was Hector Malot. The sadder, the better. Not embarrassing, but I no longer look for literature that makes me sad.

Jane Austen, Kieran?! How can anyone be embarrased about that? A great prose stylist, a great wit, and I would have thought fascinating to a sociologist for the attitudes toward class, reflections on the status of women (think of P&P, with the characters forced to marry to keep from sliding into poverty) and especially the transition from a society in which rank was the most important factor to a bourgeois individualism.

My biggest embarassments are the Tarzan series (Edgar Rice Burroughs), and – worse – the Lensman series by EE ‘Doc’ Smith. The misogyny of the latter still pains me whenever I think of it.

Also the Castaneda series. I read them thinking I was adopting an ironic attitude to them, but I took them at least half seriously.

When I was at school (early 1980s), I read pretty much all the sf and fantasy in my local library… probably several thousand books. (I had an exemption from doing any work in maths classes, so I had 8 extra hours a week to read.)

So I read pretty much all the books of Heinlein, Piers Anthony, Larry Niven, EE Doc Smith, Anne McCaffrey, you name it. And before that, in primary school, I read the Famous Five books, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Narnia, etc. And I read some Velikovsky in there, too. (And the works of Henry James, EM Forster, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and scores of other novelists!) There were only a few authors too terrible for me to deal with: Terry Brooks was too obviously and pathetically a Tolkien imitator.

A lot of those books I’ve never looked at again (my sister and I were Narnia fans until age 8 or so, when we discovered Tolkien and I never looked at Narnia again), and it’s a hard choice as to what is (retrospectively) the most cringe-worthy.

Maybe the techno-wankery of Niven and co. Maybe the dreck that is Anne McCaffrey. Maybe some of the dreck I read later on in life: Orson Scott Card or William Gibson, perhaps.

Jane Austen, Kieran?! How can anyone be embarrased about that?

Sorry, I was only joking.

I can’t believe no one has mentioned the horrible Flowers in the Attic books. I read them for the sexual content mostly–when I was about 12 and had no idea what sex was. God, those were awful. Shiver.

Any paperback with a metal-foil, embossed, or die-cut cover, about a natural disaster. Floods, ants, continent-rending quakes, mutant viruses…this seems to have been a very fertile genre in the 70s.

Even more shameful: the complete works of Kurt Vonnegut.

When I was in college studying physics and should have been studying philosophy, I read all those stupid ‘physics shows that everything is spiritually connected’ shit. Blew my mind, as I knew of no philosophy. Ah well.

Liz, IMO you overdosed on Rendell, or maybe hit a bad patch. I still devour her books (page-turners if anything) and while she reuses some tricks there’s a lot of ones that I’d guess stand up to rereading. Maybe only about a third of the ones she’s written, but that’s still an awful lot of books. (I do think she’s been mailing in the Wexfords lately.)

Is Robert Cormier embarrassing? I think Robert Cormier is probably embarrassing. They seem really deep because they have unhappy endings, but they’re really just about how everyone else is picking on poor misunderstood me, to the point of martyrdom. I suspect–I haven’t reread them since I was a teen.

Readers Digest.

Every week, a new one. I particularly liked the humor pages.
And the “I’m Joe’s Uvula” stories.

Gertrude Chandler Warner (boxcar children series)

(intellectual embarrassment, late teens) Some of the more misanthropic strands of deep ecology (Dave Foreman’s mid-80’s blatherings…)

How about Joseph Altsheler? Fifty (nearly) years later I wonder if there was much real history there or just a bunch of dubious attitude. At least I preferred the 18th-century ones to the Confederate sentimentality. Or maybe there was some real history in those and I just remember the sentimentality because I’m embarrassed by it.

What a blast from the past! I read all of his civil war series, and though I bet they wouldn’t stand up to re-reading, I don’t as of the moment feel any embarrassment. They were “sentimental” towards both sides, not just the Confederacy, as I recall, and in that sense depicted a falsely rosy past, in which men of good will tragically fell out, not one in which there were the evil of slavery and, on both sides, cases of arbitrary cruelty.

But I think he got most of the straight fighting right, and it gave me a sense, if nothing else, of the depth and complexity of military history: it’s not just one “winner-take-all” battle, but a grinding series of engagements over four years (and 8 books), with the eventual losers winning many individual battles, and the eventual winners fumbling for a strategy of victory. Basic narrative, which might in the fullness of time be augmented by analysis of the underlying causes of the war and appreciation of its subtler psychological dimensions. Good training for a boy who eventually became a historian–albeit not a military historian–IMHO.

(Possibly, however, I should avoid seeking them out today, less my “sentimental” memories be too rudely shattered.)

Enid Blyton. In the original Hebrew. Nah, not really. Perfectly decent reading for a preteen.

Then I read all of the Burroughs Tarzan novels. Still, good yarns, all.

Then, because I had seen the English version of Flowers In the Attic on my mother’s bookshelf from as early as I can remember, at age 12 I decided I wanted to know why the zombies on the cover stared at me all those years. So I read a Hebrew translation of it.

But for truly warping a mind with badness? Shortly afterwards, also in Hebrew, Quo Vadis.

Good thing I was too young to have any understanding of sex at that age, so it mostly just went right over my head.

Naturally, I’m going incognito to make this confession. It takes large amounts of alcohol to get me to admit this otherwise.

Matt-yes, I was thinking of the Wexfords! The Barbara Vines on the other hand are consistently enjoyable. But how does one know when one has overdosed on an author, or is about to overdose? A great-uncle of mine said one should always leave a party half an hour before one stops enjoying it. He never said how to know when that would be.

Sherlock Holmes and The Bible (NOT as literature but as revealed TRUTH)

Even after all these years I still blush with shame when I think about all the hours I spent whiling away at the local bookstore in eager anticipation of the next Star Trek novel, then the next Star Trek: TNG novel. Fortunately, things petered out around the Star Trek: DS9 show and I can proudly state that I have never read a Star Trek: Voyager or Enterprise book although I have to confess to moments of temptation.

As an aside, an interesting question is what book published in the last 5-10 years will make the list of the next generation of Crooked Timber readers? I’m betting on a tie between anything by Dan Brown and the Harry Potter series.

I’m with John Quiggin on Anne McCaffrey. Dragonflight contains a number of intriguing ideas, combined together into an original setting, but she should’ve stopped before Pern became a genre in itself.

While there is some embarrassing fantasy out there, like the Tolkien imitators (like Eddings and Dragonlance), I’m not sure why good books that are explicitly children’s fantasy like The Chronicles of Narnia should be grouped with them. And for Alex above, Kay and Cherryh are definitely not authors to be embarrassed by.

As for my embarrassing reads, I’d have to say Ayn Rand. Asimov’s Foundation is dated, but it was a fun retelling of Gibbon’s masterpiece in space, and not bad enough to be embarrassed by, unlike a fair bit of Heinlein.

>(Can I get a show of hands of how many people read Atlas Shrugged all the way up to and then stopped exactly when they realized that John Galt was about to give a 60 page monologue?)

Not this hand–I read that whole monologue, and then The Fountainhead too! Gawd, to think what I could’ve read instead. I’m not exactly embarrassed, though. Reading such big bricks was part of my budding sense of myself as a mighty reader. Also, my Cold-War-product father got me to read them in pursuit of enlightenment on “the virtue of selfishness.” The New Yorker expose a couple years back of Rand’s obsession with big strong men was a good laugh. When I had my father read it, he didn’t put two and two together. And he still loves Bill O’Rielly. Sigh.

“Cherryh”

Who, I must point out, taught english in my high school . . .

:)

I’ve read Herman Hesse and Vonnegut (though only one book by the latter), and I’m not quite ashamed of it. Other than those two, I haven’t read any of the other people mentioned in this thread. But I’m pretty ashamed of my Emilio Salgari phase.

I agree van Daniken was silly (I went through the UFO, Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, Abominable Snowman phase also), but it’s always struck me as interesting how close he and Carl Sagan actually were, much as Sagan denied it. Sagan and his Russian co-author beat van Daniken to the punch, after all, in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe when they speculated about an old Babylonian myth as possibly being a description of a visit by extraterrestrials.

And there’s the Fermi paradox–if there’s intelligent life out there, where are They? Sagan tended to be very optimistic about the possible numbers of intelligent civilizations just in our galaxy. I don’t have one of his books handy, but I think he thought in terms of thousands or even millions and most of these would be technologically advanced far beyond our level. Sagan and his co-author (or was it Freeman Dyson?) came up with this ranking system for civilizations, based on how much energy they could control–Type I, II, and III. The intermediate type would be the sort that was capable of dismantling planets and constructing Dyson spheres. Type III could control the power output of entire galaxies. If you take this stuff seriously, then it’s not at all silly to think that there might be unimaginably powerful ET’s who know about us already and one of the “answers” for why we don’t see ET’s is that maybe the earth is some sort of game park.
Another answer would be to claim that interstellar travel is impossible. Always, for all time, no matter if a civilization has been around for millions of years. Sounds a little implausible to me, and once you allow for interstellar travel and exponential population growth, the galaxy is not such a big place after all.

So I agree that van Daniken is silly–why would ET’s come to Earth and build pyramids or statues on Easter Island? But it always struck me as funny how hard Sagan worked at separating his views from those crazy UFO-ologists and ancient astronaut fanatics. If you take his views on the prevalence of advanced civilizations seriously, then chances are good we’re a wildlife refuge and then you’d
wonder if we ever might catch sight of the park rangers. Which is either an argument for thinking that ET’s are in fact very rare, or else that we shouldn’t be so quick to laugh at all the UFO nuts. (Though probably most of them are nothing more than nuts.)

Well, all the books I read as a child and teenager were “bad” books judged by the standards of literary criticism and scientific rationalism. Nothing wrong with Dr Doolittle, though, (he was Richard Dawkins’ childhood hero, too) and Bob Heinlein was a great story teller until he went “serious.” My favorite author at 15 was H P Lovecraft, but even then I knew his prose was awful even if his imagination was unsurpassely creepy.
The only reading I’m actually ashamed of now is my uncritical acceptance of LRH’s Dianetics and a carload of flying-saucers-are-real books (“Watch the skies!”) And that even into my ’30’s I was still capable of taking Carlos Castaneda seriously.

Most of these comments suffer from excessive refinement, kind of like saying “I thought my Mom could really cook, but then I realized she didn’t even know who Escoffier was.”

But what’s wrong with a book that’s just ‘a good read’? Heinlein’s juvies are brilliantly done. Granted, his later books seem to consist entirely of people flying around the Universe pontificating about sex and who’s in charge but even Homer nods, and sometimes Homer’s head falls off.

Isn’t it in Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” that a group of party-goers agree to a parlor game of narrating some embarrassing episode from their past?

Each one tells something that makes them look slightly bad, but mysterious, or intriguing, or flawed in some romantic-sounding way. Except the one schlemiel who misunderstands the rules of the game and tells a story that makes him look simply slimy and despicable.

And when everyone recoils from him, he feels utterly betrayed!

(This story brought to my mind by Kieran’s good quip above, i.e. pretending to offer an embarrassing story while instead trumping everyone else with an unimpeachable credential. Sort of the reverse of the poor schlemiel who misunderstands the rules in the Idiot. Which leads me to ask–why is this post titled “Reverse Humiliation”, rather than simply ‘humiliating recollections” or the like?)

Dean Koontz. I read a very large series of them when I was about 12, all that the library had, having unluckily started with the only one that is vaguely passable, which might have been called Lightning. I also read the VC Andrews books — which my GRANDMOTHER suggested to me — at the same time.

Christie, but I think she’s not so bad, especially for that age.

why is this post titled “Reverse Humiliation”, rather than simply ‘humiliating recollections”

In David Lodge’s Changing Places, there’s a game called “Humiliation” which is about books it’s embarrassing not to have read–you name a book you haven’t read, and you get a point for everyone in the group who has read it. So this. “Books you’re embarrassed you have read,” is the reverse of that. (I believe that’s the idea, anyway.)

Readers’ Digest too.
Hank Janson
William Saroyan for glutinous sentimentality (which however left me with the permanent preference for the short story over the novel)

…I think that reading nonfiction junk and taking it seriously is far more embarrassing than reading fiction junk, because you’re supposed to think that nonfiction is true.

But in the fiction category, Isaac Asimov experienced this particular embarrassment himself. One of the first SF books I ever read was the first volume of Before the Golden Age, the Asimov-edited anthology of Thirties stories that he read and loved when he was a kid. In his introduction, he said that, reading them again in adulthood, he was so shocked at the intense racism in some of the stories that he was seriously tempted to bowdlerize them, then decided that erasing that part of history wasn’t a good idea. But the racism had never registered to him on first read.

We had a discussion of Hal Lindsay here. My bullsh*t detector was working with that one.

i’m not embarrassed about any books i’ve read, either. and i loved burroughs’s tarzan books (right up until #6, then they all seemed the same), enid blyton, boney-m, choose your own adventure books, and later hermann hesse and zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

what i’m actually embarrassed about was the time i spent in adolescence, looking complacently at my bookshelves and counting off all the “big books” i had read that made me seem like an intellectual to myself. although, i have to say, if i hadn’t had the motivation to read difficult books so that i could say i had read them, i definitely wouldn’t have read so much mind-bending stuff, that incidentally DID bend my mind and stay with me into adulthood. so i guess that’s not really embarrassing either.

really, all this is about learning. why is that embarrassing?

ps. a friend of mine draws “choose your own adventure”-style comix for adult math geeks. check it out:
http://www.shigabooks.com/indeces/bookhunter.html

Matt Weiner–
Thanks–that sounds like a plausible explanation.

“Changing Places” is one of the books I am not embarrassed not to have read.

I read Colin Wilson’s The Philosopher’s Stone as well as The Mind Parasites which was even better from a this-conspiracy-of-evil-conformity-is-holding-me-back-from-becoming-a-god-so-I’ll-just-have-to-become-a-serial-killer standpoint.

Wilson was always good at making horror sound like a particularly dreary, cold, rain-sodden autumn day in some nondescript industrial town in the English Midlands. He adored Lovecraft too!

I won’t admit shame at reading his fiction, but I register deep embarassment at taking some of his purportedly nonfiction works at face value, and in my early 20’s at that! He seriously considered the possibility that a medieval monk actually flew — going so far as to state, ‘what could be the motivation for lying about something like that?’! O sancta simplicitas!

I even found a brief treatment of his literary work in our university library (can’t remember the title) in which the author concludes that ‘Wilson’s best evidence for his ideas is his own life,” the up-by-his-bootstraps persistence that propelled him out of the working class. Doesn’t make his ideas any less ludicrous.

To make up for the Jane Austen joke above:

Here’s something that I feel is genuinely indicative of what I was like as a teenager, but also could be interpreted as still within the ultimately-self-serving rules of the game we’re playing. (As Clive James says somewhere, we can try to tell autobiographical stories that put us in a bad light, but the ego arranges the bad light to its own advantage. This idea is covered at much greater length by Pierre Bourdieu.) Anyway, when I was 15 I bought the Faber & Faber paperback edition of _Finnegans Wake_ from the Collins Bookshop in Cork, for (in retrospect) two and only two reasons: (1) It was a beautiful book — as a physical object I mean: it was a paperback, but had a soft dustjacket in a subtle pinstripe blue in a matt finish, which covered a plain white volume with a small portrait of Joyce on it. I still have it. (2) It was somewhat cheaper than the Gabler edition of _Ulysses_, which had just come out in paperback (1987 I think), and which I bought the following year. This was a decisive point at the time, as eight or nine quid was a pretty substantial amount of money.

Of course, I barely understood a word of it. But it’s not as if I wandered around the town (or even the house) with my copy of it in my hand, either. There was something of the mysterious, hidden text about it. In a way that only accentuated its beautiful design. I read Anthony Burgess’s _Here Comes Everybody_ to illuminate the former point (easily the best introduction to Joyce for my money — especially if you’re 15!), and got sucked into the world of typography as a consequence of the second. For this reason I think I’d rather be designing the typefaces of books than writing the text of them, and I would be doing something like this were it not for an absolute absence of talent in that department.

I cut my SF teeth on “Tom Swift, Jr.”, thank god for it. Started me on a lifetime of reading.

Ralph, you’re kidding, right? Rand’s notion that the world’s (or at least America’s) intellectual and creative elites can hide themselves away in an undisclosed Rocky Mountain location, live luxuriously without a significant industrial base for an extended period of time, and then eventually emerge to remake the world in their image has the same general level of credibility as Bart Simpson’s monkey butlers.

…and michener. oh, god. michener. james michener. those enormous books that start off with 150 pages of plate tectonics, and then get duller. I read’em all. and worse, I thought his ‘Drifters’ was a meaningful extended essay on the 60’s. i had repressed these memories. i must go die now.

It sounds like most commenters are ashamed of who they were when they read the books they cringe at now.
I think Le Guin’s on thin ice talking trash about Richard Bach, considering the flat didactic pc cant of some of her stuff – but then when she’s good, she’s really good, and so’s Bach.
There’s a nasty version of false maturity that takes its weight from the scorn it can express for simpler things and naive attitudes, it’s contagious and virulent and needs to be defended against.
That’s what I think causes most of the shame at past affinities.
Yes to Gary and Liz above on that.
And whoever was dissing Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, folly to you, sir!
I cried while reading that book.
Not wept but experienced the physical aspects of sorrow. Not all through it, but at one specific passage.
Robert Heinlein walked 9 y.o. me up and into and through infinite spatiality at exactly the moment my mind was ready to go with him, and that’s always going to make up for any amount of over-compensating masculine swagger, or technocratic chauvinism.
There were books I regretted reading when I was young, but I’ve forgotten them. These days I’ve learned to bail early.
And any shame I had later for books I earlier liked was part of a further developing – once past that there is no shame.
Books other people are embarrassed or scornful about as unliterary or pulp or whatever – Louis Lamour, Michener, the thriller guys like Grisham and Forsyth – I’ll read if they’re what’s around and not be ashamed, and am often pleasantly surprised at their skill and vision.
Someone who’s not as popular as he might be that I would like to give a gratuitous but admiring plug here is Paul West. Terrestrialsat its best is fine writing.
I read Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp when I was a confused teenager, and went through periods of shame later at having loved a book written by a public homosexual – when I read it I hadn’t known at all who he was. But in its time and place, for me it was a perfect thing to read. Like To Kill A Mockingbird was, or later on Faulkner’s The Bear.
Or Joyce Carol Oates’ The Falls last year.
Ballard, Budrys, Cordwainer Smith, Tiptree, Russ, Sturgeon, John Crowley, Lucius Shepherd, The Thieves’ World collective…the legion of SF makers who earned my loyalty, they all have their vulnerabilites, maybe none as exposed as Bach to Le Guin’s facile rapier, but none of them are masters outside their genre either.
So what?
No one’s ever arrived at perfect awareness and needed something to read afterward.
We’re all incomplete, most especially when we’re young, and the books we read are too.
The vertices of personal growth and understanding and the coincident availablity of appropriate literature won’t always dovetail – but how lucky we are when they do.

Kieran in 123, on Finnegan’s Wake: “Of course, I barely understood a word of it.” Now, of course, he speed-reads it while listening to his favourite John Cage records.

I read the Narnia series, Tolkien, and some Vonnegut in junior and senior high school and loved them. They certainly hold up well.

I read Clancy in high school and college and I loved the techology and action, but I tolerated the incredibly wooden characters and the right wind politics, so some embarassment. His later books were just too bad to read, though I tried for awhile.

I shudder with horror that as a kid I read Jack Chick comics (his tracts and his Crusader series) and completely imbided the worldview. Madness.

I, too, had an Ayn Rand phase; it was in 11th grade and it changed everything! Well, not really, but I thought so for a few weeks or months, then it passed.

Exodus by Leon Uris – at about 11, without an inkling that Palestinians might have a somewhat different take (had I heard of Palestinians? – almost certainly not)…

I can´t believe Watership Down has not yet been mentioned.

And Lobsang Rampha, also pre-adolescence – I remember fervently lying in bed willing myself to levitate (and I´m sure that I managed it too).

I suppose part of the ‘shame’ comes from having been an uncritical reader, of swallowing something hook, line and sinker. (And, in my case, of having been ‘shamed’ by someone into abandoning a book I was enjoying, however silly it might have been.) Most of the books mentioned here (that I have read, at any rate) have rip-roaring plots, and are indeed page-turners. Perhaps there is a childish desire for plot-based narrative in all of us. Why else are the Harry Potter books, so brilliantly plotted, so popular? (And is it more shame-worthy to be caught reading Harry Potter, or to be caught reading Harry Potter with one of those carefully designed covers for ‘adults’?)

Generally speaking, I find literary enjoyment to be a bit of a crap-shoot: much depends, these days, on mood, time of year, time of day, whatever is going on in my life. I’ve abandoned a few books lately, because I’m in the wrong mood for them. The same is even more true for me of films. I don’t think my filters were so arbitrary as a teenager, I simply read whatever came my way. And on reflection I’m not sure I’m embarrassed by the VC Andrews books any more, terrible as they were, though I do wonder what teen-incest-gothic novels were doing in my high school library.

The seeming implication by some, incidentally, that there is some sort of Objective Standard Of “Good,” in terms of literary virtues, bothers me no end.

Yes, yes, yes, i can understand that, but why does it come up in this rather playful thread?

The standards of Bad are less tricky than the Good ones. It’s rather straightforward to poke fun at mass produced dope like Eddings’, simple freaks like Rand or wackos like Clancy.

You can do that without being some True Art bore, i’m sure.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, without a doubt worse than the Pern series!

Oh, and I used to read my grandma’s True Detective magazines when I was a kid.

clarity: i speak only for my own comments, but i suspect what i say may have bearing on others – i’m not ashamed of the books i read. they’re just books, and there as as many lousy books in any genre, and any stratum of written work, as any other. good luck to them all.

i’m ashamed (and only mildly, really – more like embarrassed), at the reasons i did so (for some of them) and at the breathless, guileless swallowing of hooks, lines and sinkers that i was prepared to do.

the thread is not lit-crit, as some seem to think – it’s self-revelation.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho until I realized it was little more than Ayn Rand for progressives.

They (and Joseph Campbell) pretty much all share the same message: “Do what you want without thought for the consequences to others.”

Follow your bliss, my ass.

When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I had an English teacher who based his class’s advertising unit on Wilson Bryant Key’s Subliminal Seduction. I read the book, believed every word, and went on to read his sequels, Media Sexploitation and The Clam-Plate Orgy. My mother tried to get me to read some Ralph Nader instead, to no avail.

Much later, it dawned on my that my ability to see “SEX” written into the patterns of wall-to-wall carpeting might not be a sign that the carpet manufacturers had embroidered subliminal messages into their products.

But I didn’t read Atlas Shrugged (until this year). Even as an angst-and-hormone-laden teenager, I had standards.

Weird. I’m not ashamed or even particularly bothered at all the product I have read and continue to read. The only authors I’m embarassed about reading are ones I read only because I wanted to be sure I was justified in NOT reading them. Which is the strangest kind of literary hairshirting.

Generally, they fall into specific categories.

Romance potboilers: Danielle Steele, Jackie Collins.

Best-selling SF/Fantasy: Stephen Donaldson.

NYC Cocktail Party Smalltalk Books: Philip Roth (except for PORTNOY), Saul Bellow, Updike, Cheever, both Wolfes. The only one of those I am actively hostile about is the relentlessly inadequate Salinger. But the rest of them have that sort of dated “isn’t that quaint” quality of wrestling with big ideas from the squeezed sphincter POV that that comes from excerpts from sophomore philosophy class as translated through the transcendence of one’s own cock. Kind of like Kingsley Amis, except replace “cock” with “glass of gin”.

But you know, that’s no better or worse than the often stilted “word from the streets” style of writers I like, like Algren, Farrell, London, or Dreiser. but I came to those on my own, not from some sense of obligation to literary culture and distrust of my own taste.

The writer whose dated race-writing most embarasses me is Vachel Lindsay, especially his poem CONGO.

“Jim Corbett: Space Cadet. Enough said.”

Perhaps not. Any relation to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet?

“the thread is not lit-crit, as some seem to think – it’s self-revelation.”

Quite so.