what books did u love when u were 15? do u still rate them now?

so ive been rereading robert jordan's wheel of time books 4 a project and these books were epic to me when i was that age. for a long time i disavowed them but theyre not that bad better in some ways then my memory of them - and its kind of interesting to see how much resonance theyve had in what i value in what i read now outside of fantasy - so ive been thinking about what i read before i read *seriously* and how much those books matter to me now

lol thread regret - better qn is really what books were formative i guess oh well

lol jrpg nerd used to be into robert jordan

I mean, welcome to ILB and we hope your first thread goes well, uh.

"used to be"

when i was 15 i was deeply convinced and passionately explained to others that this emblem of my newfound taste and devotion to literature

<img src=http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/data/media/33/Zelazny-port.jpg>;

was deeply aesthetically superior to the childish things i had left behind as epitomised by this:

<img src=http://i11.ebayimg.com/03/i/001/23/7f/a4cc_1.JPG>;

so i can't really talk

oh, bugger.

fig.1:

http://www.john-howe.com/portfolio/gallery/data/media/33/Zelazny-port.jpg

fig.2:

http://i11.ebayimg.com/03/i/001/23/7f/a4cc_1.JPG

Wait those are both not terrible covers. Are you in the UK? The Eddings books were miserably bad here.

uk fantasy covers are miles better than na ones - cf. robert jordan

one hundred years of solitude. Had read it 2 or 3 times before I turned 16. 16/17 Camus became my new hero.

Oh and yes I do still rate one hundred years of solitude, though I now prefer Love in the time of Cholera, which at the time I found too sentimental.

When I was fifteen my favorite books were probably On The Road, Naked Lunch, The Stranger and Our Lady of the Flowers. LOL teenager. I haven't read any of them in years but I assume I'd still rate them pretty highly if only for the impact they had on the teenage me.

oh yeah I really like On the Road too. Wrote an essay about it for school.

And have no idea if i still rate it.

I got yelled at for reading OtR by my 10th grade English teacher (Catholic school) who told me that it wasn't a "nice" book for a girl like me to be reading.

when i was 15 my english teacher was the only really attractive teacher in school, and she was only in her late 20s or whatever. We did book reviews every month on whatever we'd been reading and since mine were usually "serious" "literary" type things like D.H. Lawrence, Camus, Garcia Marquez, Dostoyevsky, she always wrote really glowing comments on my jotter. Oh, the crush.

Still think are wonderful: Burroughs, Nietzsche, Sartre, Vonnegut
Still think are ok, or at least ok for a 15 year-old, but often a bit 'meh': Ballard, Banks, Camus, McEwan (earlier stuff), Sagan
Loved then, can't stand now: Amis (Martin)

Although I do still think the ones in the first category are pretty great authors in their own capacities, I think if the question had been 16 or 17 there would have been a lot less of the mediocre stuff.

I liked On the Road and Our Lady of the Flowers at that age, too, but was trying to think more in terms of authors who I read multiple books by. Not sure why now, actually.

thinking about it i dont really even remember what i loved when i was 15

penthouse letters collections probably

Oh shit I can't believe I forgot Vonnegut because actually at 15 Cat's Cradle was probably my #1 fav book. That would definitely still rank pretty highly.

I almost forgot Vonnegut, too! Was getting stuck in the fact that half of the authors I loved at 15 start with one of the first three letters of the alphabet. I don't think it was just because I never got further than that at the bookshop, honest.

penthouse letters collections probably

how well do these "hold up"?????

my serious author thing was nabokov read all his books i could

The Stranger, Fight Club, The Three Pillars of Zen, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Nabokov didn't enter my radar until freshman year of college when I took a class on Nabokov, Borges and Calvino. Man, that was one of the best (if not the best) classes I ever took both undergrad and grad school combined.

I fifteen I would sneak my Dad's PH so I could read the forum letters and they was probably as riveting to me then as any of the above-mentioned authors tbh.

"At" fifteen . . . ugh.

actually i totally know--phillip k dick, i still rate them pretty highly

Oh man Ficciones was huge for me

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I didn't get into Borges until 17 or so. Foolish, foolish me.

philip dick is probably my best answer to this, my big thing at 14/15 was going

fantasy and sf in general -> philip dick -> new wave SF -> pomo bollocks -> 'literature'

One of the things I picked up along the way was a kind of put-upon mad-on for modernist difficulty which I'm not sure whether I still believe in or not, or how genuine it was at the time: the attitudes I associate with this period of things are pretty much the negative ones derived from my reaction to my previous period as a reader, being against STORIES and CHARACTERS and stuff.

I would still rate Dick quite highly, and I think from a purely technical POV he's probably underrated: but his books aren't Mindblowingly Amazing these days: so when I read one the extent to which they've had to come down in my estimation kind of sucks away a lot of the pleasure I would otherwise take.

I think I dallied with everything mentioned except the zen by 16. EXCEPT for 'our lady of the flowers': i have no idea at all what this is

OLotF is Jean Genet.

One of the things I picked up along the way was a kind of put-upon mad-on for modernist difficulty which I'm not sure whether I still believe in or not

@ ~ 16 got really into this too via beckett and borges became really disdainful of books where "things happen" felt v. much that i was 2 real 4 that

I was about to say that I still have that dislike of plot, but I don't think that's true. I just think that the form and content distinction is one always designed to privilege content, and that form should be allowed to provide meaning more often. The two can never be properly distinguished anyway.

Also, I remembered that I also liked the Marquis de Sade aged 15. I have no idea what that says about me.

also

15 was a weird transitional age. It was just before I had my pash on Camus, like Jim (and I suspect many others), and while I was growing heartily sick of endlessly reading Stephen King and Frank Herbert stuff. I suppose my favourite writing would still have been the sort of thing I like most when I was 12 -

The Dark is Rising novels or sequence or whatever
The Earthsea novels
Philip K Dick short stories

and, my god did I love Douglas Hill. I mean seriously. Even then I realised they were sort of space pop, science westerns, rather than science fiction proper, but I couldn't get enough of the The Last Legionary. I thought he was the bomb.

Good lord, just looked him up in wikipedia, cos I knew nothing about him -

Raised in Saskatchewan, the son of a train driver,

He lived in Wood Green, London, and died in London after being struck by a bus at a zebra crossing.[3] This was only the day after he completed his last trilogy.

Other than that, some Alan Garner maybe, remember liking MR James very much from an early age - a thing that still hasn't left me. The Scarecrows by Robert Westall too.

At 15 I think I read more music writing and def the first bks I loved were about music, although I can't remember for sure that this happened at 15, as I was in (as I reflect now) a weird transitional period where I was learning the language I was to adopt (English) and losing my ability to speak the language I grew up with.

That possibly sounds as if I was a character out of some 10th rate 'modernist' novel, huh?

The first fiction person I loved was PKD. I would hear about Camus, Kerouac and Burroughs through the music press - only ever bothered to pick up the latter, and still haven't bothered with Kerouac. Camus and Genet I only read last year - the former I enjoyed ok; Genet I'll probably live with for life, etc.

Oh also: Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung

All my friends were into Kerouac and Burroughs but I was and am a Ginsberg man tbh

when i was 15 i was reading stuff like this:

http://jewkesfamily.com/snarkyreviews/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/hyperion-front-book-cover1.gif

http://www.chrismasto.com/delicious/images/222

At 15 I was a big SF nut: loved then and love now PK Dick, John Wyndham, the earlier William Gibson, John Christopher. But I also read a lot of fantasy stuff that now I couldn't begin to comprehend why I liked it (ie the first Dragonlance trilogy, pretty much any non-Tolkien fantasy trilogy)

i think i read all the TSR fantasy stuff when i was 10 - 14 and might have been too cool (lol) for it by the time i hit 15

I feel like the odd man out for never really being into sci fi or fantasy its weird

i guess ur life was 2 full of magic already

oh, 15 was a big George Orwell time for me too. Completely forgot about that. Haven't read a novel of his for years, but I remain a fan of his essays.

oh i loved and still love the shit out of hemingway ob

i no longer rate t wolfe but this was a touchstone @ 15

http://www.lysergia.com/MerryPranksters/KoolAid_1stUSEd_front.jpg

A very formative literary event occured for me at the age of 15 in one of my classes. One of my friends got asked what some paragraph in some book meant to him and he shouted "IT'S JUST A BOOK IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING" and walked out.

occurred

was your friend kanye west?

Oh, yeah, Orwell. I was big into '1984' and 'Animal Farm' at the time. Read nothing else by him for another 10 years, but still! The first money I ever earned from writing ($20) I used to buy a 'Complete Novels of George Orwell'.

pretty sure Billy Liar was my favourite book when i was 15 and i've prob read it more times than any other book. i had another look at it the other day and thought yeah this is still great.

'Billy Liar' is fab! I didn't read it until I was 30, but I so should have read that when I got my first job and became instantly jaded.

I have a terrible memory for this stuff. Definitely read The Plague at 15, loved it. Probably read One Hundred Years of Solitude around that time. The Master and Margarita and The Circus of Dr. Lao were then and still are favorites. I think that was the year that I had a totally worthless English teacher, so I can't remember too well what we read. I do remember reading Ishmael for another class and finding it to be some bullshit.

I was probably still reading Ray Bradbury, getting into Neil Gaiman, Hunter S Thompson.

I still haven't read any Kerouac, or Zen, or even goddamned Catcher in the Rye.

haha I think I watched Billy Liar at 15 and it made me miserable.

anybody growing up in a crap town should read Billy Liar...but yeah it is kind of a downer

as well as being completely hilarious, i mean

A decade ago I was probably mainly reading a lot of bad Fantasy novels like David Eddings, Stephen Donaldson, Robert Jordan etc. I wouldn't say I "rate" them exactly now, but the main reason I don't read them these days is I don't have endless summers to wade through 10 1,000+ page novels. Whatever their merits as "literature", they were great escapism at the time. Now I read a lot of SF, but also crime fiction and I guess "proper" books or whatever, but I don't think my taste has changed *that* much, except for becoming a bit more discerning and a lot less interested in reading the kind of books that one "ought" to read.

i read a lot in my earlier teens, and later too, but the year of being 15 itself is strangely blank. year of exams. definitely read 'naked lunch', though; doubt i 'loved' it, and i didn't 'get it' till i re-read it a few years later n e way. i guess i 'rate' the experience of 'getting it', but i won't be reading it again.

i doubt i'd love many of the books i read around then -- like will self and ballard -- because they were books 'people' (the nme?) told me to like, and they aren't very loveable are they?

I too shifted out of SF/Fantasy around 14, tho' some of it - PKD, most obvs - hung around into my LITERATURE phase (ongoing). The one author I read a lot of at 15 who leaves me cold now is Bernard Shaw; useful then – all that argumentation and provocation is healthy for a growing boy – but I just don't ever feel like reading him nowadays.

I did have a Burroughs + Kathy Acker sex-shock-violence time around here, but it didn't sit that well on me. I really had to fight my way through boredom - not that I'd have admitted it to myself - to finish that stuff; I've got interest and respect for that stuff, I guess, but I just think it would a chore to read it again.

I fell for Auden a year or two later, but at 15 WB Yeats and John Donne were my favourite poets. I lost the passion for both a bit as an under- and post-grad - too much academic talk had left me jaded - but they're both back more or less where they started now (OH - remembering I loved Plath, then hated her. Now I quite like her.)

Donne reminds me I was an aspirational reader: sitting on buses & in libraries not really understanding and trying to figure out wtf was going on in these poems (same with Eliot): I think most of my expectations of poetry, and maybe literature more generally, have been shaped by those figuring-it-out hours at 15. In part it's voices I grew used to, but it's also that same 'What is this? What's going on? How's it work? There's something here, I can almost reach it' impulse.

Reckon I'd still like most of any top ten list I would have made at 15. The sense of identification has cooled - no more 'I AM STEPHEN DEDALUS' - but I still love Joyce.

im pretty glad i didnt get into borges calvino pomo bs until a couple years ago because id probably hate it now if i had been a little shit about it at 15

read ulysses aged 17, may account for general 'fuk u modernism' approach i take now.

x-post Yeah, I'm pretty glad about that too.

I think that 'not understanding' phase was absolutely crucial - it was when I began identifying myself as a reader (what sort of effect is this book producing in me?) and not just as a sort of fantasist participant (how much am I enjoying imagining myself in this world?). That's not at all to say one is better than the other by the way - but the one that came later is still the thing that drives me to the unfamiliar.

This definitely happened at about 16 for me (late developer), and I associate it with a whole intellectual flowering and energy, from which I emerged from my somnolent youth. The general background for are the typical teenage convulsions, but I can locate a specific provocation, which was The Fall's Ed's Babe EP - this isn't to say it has any inherent magical properties, but it provided the key to the kingdom.

In recent years I've had to fight against going back into the early teenage stage - I've never really weaned myself from the adventures in strange worlds, and I have to regularly remind myself that the reader trying to understand the unfamiliar and difficult is in itself the best adventure in the strangest world.

xpost - had a similar reaction to early 20th century modernism, which I immersed myself in as a teenager, but reviled in my late 20s. Got a more or less sensible perspective now I hope (probably just a Laodicean tho). Still have moments of vicious recusance.

Borges and Calvino are two of my favorites and I don't know that I would have "got" them at 15. Also, I tend to view some of the stuff I was reading then as LOL pretentious teen English major wannabe crap and I am glad that the danger isn't there with those.

x-post

between 4th and 8th grade i read terry brooks' shannara books, the hobbit, a tale of two cities, moby dick, some james fenimore cooper, jack london, a lot of shakespeare plays, and every single sherlock holmes story and novel. plus a lot of others. i actually read 'battlefield earth' when i was 13 or 14, i think (the stamp on the cover said 'soon to be a major motion picture starring john travolta.' this was in '88 or '89.)

i also owned this:

http://tommcmahon.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834515db069e2010536a82a31970c-800wi

i managed to get through a few of them but i'm sure i was in over my head.

!!!

In 4th grade I'm pretty sure I was still reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Babbysitters' Club stuff.

From 5th - 8th it was mostly V.C. Andrews because my Mom had no idea about all the o_O sex stuff in them and would buy them for me to encourage reading.

i remember very little of what i read at 15, but it was mostly a lot of crime/thriller/horror fiction, mixed with a lot of non-fiction concerning apartheid (we were learning about this in history and i remember being completely shocked by it). a couple of yrs earlier i'd read catcher in the rye and to kill a mockingbird (which i loved, and were completely different to anything i'd read before), mostly because they were titles that were in my subconscious, but i had absolutely no direction with what to read - librarian was a hick, my entire family are non-readers, my friends were in the same boat, our english teachers were making us read things like 'day of the triffids' and lots of colonial hard-life fictionalised bios.

But 'Day of the Triffids' is awesome!!!

enbb i think half the science fiction novels i read had some o_O sex scenes in them but i had no clue what was going on, i may have mistaken them for action scenes.

Oh yeah I had no idea either really. We used to trade the V.C. Andrews stuff at school and then talk about it and try to figure out what was going on etc.

xp i have zero recollection of it, except that i didn't enjoy it!

i read a ton of vc andrews and other romantic/porno trash when i was probably 10 or so because they were the only books my nana had at her house when i went to stay.

"there was this weird six page fight scene between the hero and this girl and i don't know how it ended but at the beginning of the next chapter they were on even better terms than before..."

so er guys how old is everyone?

just bcz i wonder how it relates to how you perceive your 15 year old self (i am 23.)

I literally can't remember what I read when I was 15. I know that I read a bunch of influential stuff when I was younger (tons of Heinlein, Flatland, 1984, Brave New World, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, way too much Piers Anthony, Douglas Adams) and a bunch of influential stuff when I was older (Catch-22, Johnny Got His Gun, Sula, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Going After Cacciato, The Stranger, Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, Siddhartha, Death In Venice), but I have no recollection of what I read when I was 15.

Oh wait, yes I do: It and The Stand. And yeah, I'll stand by both of those until the day I die.

I think I read Black Boy that year, too. Kind of hysterical that I can remember all of these respectable books that I read in high school, many of my own volition, when nowadays I basically only read pulpy fantasy nonsense.

xpost now is that the edited or the bloated version of the stand ur offering to stand by?

-

yes to this:

"aspirational reader: sitting on buses & in libraries not really understanding and trying to figure out wtf was going on in these poems (same with Eliot): I think most of my expectations of poetry, and maybe literature more generally, have been shaped by those figuring-it-out hours at 15. In part it's voices I grew used to, but it's also that same 'What is this? What's going on? How's it work? There's something here, I can almost reach it' impulse."

although the age in question for me here is like all of 15-17, and i was way more about the novel than i was about poetry, and i developed a lot of prejudices in doing it about stuff that didn't make you struggle.

i think my excuse for the prejudices is that at the time i thought my personal canon would be stuff that in some superstructural way i had yet to figure out all hung together, was compatible with the same worldview and same aesthetic, consisted of 'all the stuff that is worthwhile to read there is' - which feeling kind of cast itself off gradually over the past few years.

i think this is one key to how intense one's feelings of aesthetic engagement ran those years - that everything i was into presented itself as facets of one whole and capable of answering the same questions of interpretation, if only i could work out what they were: whereas in the process of working out the questions you want to ask of these things you realise, well, it doesn't work like that. there's different answers or they are mute or whatever

otoh by 'those years' i mean 'earlier in this decade' so really i dunno if i can talk

now is that the edited or the bloated version of the stand ur offering to stand by?

Both: I read the original and then reread the unnecessarily larger one later and loved both.

(btw I am 36 now)

yeah i read both 'it' and 'the stand' around that time too. the bloated 'stand' i will stan for. 'it' is great but at some point it just goes off the rails. i still remember that awesomely gratuitous scene where one teen boy tries to give another a handjob.

'it' is great but at some point it just goes off the rails.

IMO it's both of the "final confrontation" scenes. It also has the traditional horrible Stephen King ending.

doesn't the end of IT involve some sort of existential turtle-being?

i will say that it's got a really terrifying premise towards the beginning esp. as someone who grew up in a small town with creepy storm drains

What I remember is that, after the fight with the giant evil turtle, the main dude's wife was mentally traumatized by the whole return to Derry and the confrontation with Pennywise, so dude puts her on the handlebars of his old bicycle and rides down a hill in an attempt to recreate "E.T."

I admit I may be misremembering.

oh shit i think that's right

"Shortly after this, Beverly sees Patrick get assaulted by Henry after he masturbated him and was bold enough to offer him oral sex. Patrick is then killed by It in the form of flying leeches."

"The novel ends with the various Losers returning home with everyone, including Mike, forgetting about each other and It. Bill uses the last of childhood to take off on his beloved bike, Silver, and brings Audra out of her catatonic state, although neither can remember what really happened in Derry."

remember the ABC movie? the stuff that was so scary when Pennywise said it in all caps was sooooo lame when Tim Curry said it

On 12 March 2009, Warner Bros. announced that the production of a new adaptation of Stephen King's novel had started. Dan Lin, Roy Lee and Doug Davison are set to produce. [1]

At 15, I think I was still mainly reading science fiction. Some favorites in those days:

Frank Herbert- the Dune series
Isaac Asimov - the Foundation series
Robert Heinlein - Starship Troopers

I haven't looked at those books in ages - I suspect I might not find them very interesting to read today.

I think I was 13 when I read Starship Troopers. I still consider it to be one of my favorite books even though it's been over a decade since I read it.

you should read 'the forever war' by joe haldeman if you haven't already

I may have...? Since I don't remember, I'll pick it up.

this has been said before and will be said again and by people who bother to back up the argument but

heinlein's juvenile fiction proper >>>> starship troopers

You might be right there... he did one called 'Citizen of the Galaxy', I think, which I must have read around age 12 or so, and it was uncomfortable but great. I'm 33 now, btw.

Citizen of the Galaxy was great and could be added to my favourite books when I was 15 or so. I would certainly second what thomp said.

I realised that while I am ok with most of the books I liked when I was 15, it's excruciating to remember the stuff I was against – often passionately & in elaborately argued ways – without having read. Random stuff that I like or love now: Waugh. Wallace Stevens. Critical Theory (yes, as a whole). Most of the Victorians. Austen. There are more, but I honestly think I'm blocking them. Too awkward to remember.

That drifts on through my 20s: I'm more embarrassed in retrospect by my narrow-mindedness than my enthusiasm (however natural and useful partisan zeal is at certain ages).

The other suspect reading habit that me-at-15 had was a fixation on Irish literature - classic 2nd generation child.

(I'm 35, btw)

halfway through The Forever War, which is fucking fantastic

It really is! Don't, however, read the sequel ('Forever Free') unless you're a masochist. Worst cop-out ending in the history of the world EVER.

is forever free or forever peace the one in which (SPOILER) they are all arbitrarily killed by an interventionist god?

That'd be Free, pretty much. Peace, which sounds as though it OUGHT to be the sequel, is the unconnected one about American soldiers remote-piloting war robots in foreign wars.

At 15 my favourite books were

The Power of One
The Catcher in the Rye
The Basketball Diaries
This Boy's Life

The last 3 are still faves. This Boy's Life is the first book that made me realise what writing could be.

It was very long ago. I can remember 14 and 16, but 15 is a blank and I have to interpolate. PKD and Malzberg. I discovered The Atrocity Exhibition at 14, but I was still going back to it. Nova Express is in there somewhere. Waiting for Godot was at 14 because I can remember the room I was in. My English teacher told me about Borges at 14 but I only got to Ficciones at 16. A lost year, I guess. Damn.

heinlein's juvenile fiction proper >>>> starship troopers >>>> the later tomes

Remembered 2 other really important ones. A great uncle gave me Borges 'Book of Imaginary Beings' and a cousin gave me Calvino's 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' at about the same time. The combination blew my mind, and I love both Borges and Calvino still.

Combinations were what it was about for me at this age,about a year older maybe - I suppose it was an example of a naive mind triangulating its cultural and intellectual position. Key combinations for me

Myth of Sisyphus-Picture of Dorian Gray
Twilight of the Idols-The Brothers Karamozov
Beckett's Trilogy-To Have and Have Not

are three good examples. They sort of fed off each other to create an aesthetic or creed, which I felt somehow represented philosophical truth. Hopelessly callow of me, but I miss the feeling of discovery, a tremendous surging excitement, that this sort of reading produced. The recognition of hidden sympathies.

Somewhat surprisingly given that I was a fairly bookish kid and now a fairly bookish adult I hardly read any fiction for pleasure throughout my teens. I read prescribed books at school but I doubt that that amounted to more than a novel a year - I remember Animal Farm, The Lord of the Flies and A High Wind in Jamaica (plus the inevitable Shakespeare and some poetry). My father was keen on science fiction, mainly short stories, and I read little bits and pieces of that plus some Ian Fleming, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. And that's really about it between the ages of 12 and about 20, probably no more than 10 books and fairly undemanding stuff at that. Around 20 I picked up a novel by Henry Miller (Plexus), I loved it and it got me started reading, first more Miller and then the guys he was enthusiastic about (Miller was very good at communicating his enthusiasms) - D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. So I suppose I'm indebted to Miller that I read for pleasure, although I have no interest in re-reading him now.