April 07, 2012
What Books Make You Cringe To Remember?
Nadia Chaudhury "asked an assortment of literary-inclined people to revisit the books they loved back in the day, the ones that make them absolutely cringe today" in The Awl:
Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine
Oh man, I suspect you're going to be hearing this answer a lot, but: the complete works of Ayn Rand. I discovered them toward the end of high school and walked around for a couple of years giving Howard Roark-like speeches to everyone about "the highest blazing good of selfish free-market epistemology" or something. In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that my Objectivist phase had more to do with the subjective agonies of post-adolescence (insecurity, narcissism) than it did with pure reason. (And you could argue the same thing about Ayn Rand's relationship to it.)
Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh: A Novel
In high school I read a brisk mix of science fiction, fantasy and gay potboilers (Mass Effect 3 now is perhaps the best way to imagine my brain then). So, the novels of Marion Zimmer Bradley—I still can't look at Mists of Avalon—plus the Darkover novels, which all had some gay potboiler action, now that I think of it. And hello Gordon Merrick, famous for The Lord Won't Mind but I am thinking of The Great Urge Downward.
Yes, that is the title.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:05 PM | Permalink
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Posted by: huda | Apr 7, 2012 2:24:01 PM
Nadia was ahead of her time, as was Ayn Rand, but that is not a good thing.
Posted by: Dredd | Apr 7, 2012 4:33:22 PM
Kahlil Gibran, Kerouac, Ayn Rand - Ok, I get it. But to suggest that liking Virginia Woolf, Raymond Carver, and Toni Morrison is cringe-worthy is just pretentious horseshit. Anybody who says that should just go fuck themselves, seriously.
Posted by: Al | Apr 7, 2012 5:12:38 PM
I feel for you -- if you think Virginia Woolf is a writer to outgrow. If you think that's where Carver and Morrison fit in, too, then you are still very young and have not lived to reread with insight. You are probably 34, and imagine you are a still-young grown-up with a past, and with tastes that can never reassert themselves. Well -- keep living.
I am not ashamed by any of my youthful reading. I read the Western classics too soon, and will for that reason continue to reread them. They reveal themselves with every era, with every rereading. I read world mythology as a child and teenager, and still read it -- I could fall to my knees with gratitude for this. I could disown some college girl affinities, but not really -- all of us are made by what we read, and cannot disconnect from it any more than we could disallow the pulmonary vein to return oxygenated blood to the heart.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Apr 7, 2012 6:20:19 PM
No one mentioned Herbert Marcuse or Ivan Illich? Such proles.
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Apr 7, 2012 9:17:02 PM
I never understood the fascination with Ayn Rand
Posted by: Ivona Poyntz | Apr 8, 2012 1:54:42 AM
Lovely comment, Elatia. Ayn Rand, if she were alive, would probably hate my guts for all the socialist tendencies I've acquired as I've got older, but to denounce and belittle the passion she once evoked in me simply because I disagree with her today seems to me to be a betrayal of something a lot more important than ideology.
Posted by: Alasdair Cameron | Apr 8, 2012 4:43:49 AM
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_faq_index2#ar_q1
Quotes from above link:
“[From ARI’s monthly newsletter Impact, 06/2000]
“Ayn Rand, born Alisa Rosenbaum, based her professional first name on a Finnish one [see above]. The source of her last name, however, has been a mystery.
Where and when was Ayn Rand born?
St. Petersburg, Russia, February 2, 1905.
Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, of heart failure. She was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., next to her husband Frank O’Connor (who died in 1979). See also: “To the Reader,” by Harry Binswanger, The Objectivist Forum, Vol. 3, No. 1.
What university did Ayn Rand attend and what subject did she study?
Ayn Rand entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history, and
graduated in 1924. “
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-27/entertainment/ayn.rand.atlas.shrugged_1_john-galt-ayn-rand-institute-atlas?_s=PM:SHOWBIZ Quote from above article:
“Rand book sales are "going through the roof," said Yaron Brook, the president of the Ayn Rand Institute. According to Brook, "Atlas Shrugged," her most famous novel, has sold more copies in the first four months of 2009 than it did for all of 2008 -- and in 2008, it sold 200,000 copies. It's been in Amazon.com's top 50 for more than a month.
Not bad for a 1,100-page doorstop of a book that came out in 1957, by an author who died in 1982”
www.riseupforamerica.com Quote of Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged:
“When you see that in order to produce you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you…. you may know that your society is doomed.”
Quote from first link above:
“Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totaling more than 25 million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture. “
Posted by: WJAbbe | Apr 8, 2012 7:57:26 AM
I (a different Al) read Al's comment above as saying that Woolf, Carver and Morrison were *not* to be dismissed as adolescent interests and that people who did dismiss them as such were foolish.
Agree that Elatia's comment was beautiful and I think there is something circulatory about the way we take things from books and put things into them differently as we age.
What are the Western Classics, out of interest?
Posted by: Al | Apr 8, 2012 8:43:04 AM
I liked Ayn Rand when I was 16--
What 16 year old would not like to be a hero for being a complete asshole?
But simple ideas for simple minds end as one achieves experience and knowledge with the real world.
And, in reality, it was horrifically written.
Posted by: Dave Ranningd | Apr 9, 2012 1:31:20 AM
Is WJAbbe one of those infantry men/women in the Randian army that trolls the comment sections of articles protecting and defending the good name of his/her Russian queen or a particularly unorganized spam bot?
Posted by: MM | Apr 9, 2012 12:05:39 PM
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