Teenage Bookcase Embarssments

There was a time in college and just after when I was overly infected with Ezra Pound's snobbism. But it was an homage I needed to pay him for teaching me about some important aspects of poetry. In retrospect, I wish I'd gotten over it sooner, but that was my own weakness answering Pound's. He wasn't to blame for it being there in me.

I’m pretty sad that most of the books everyone mentioned are ones I have and really like or ones I want. But I guess whatever lights your candle, right?

I attempted reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test late last year, figuring it would, if nothing else, at least be entertaining in a "my, those druggies were crazy fools" way, but I found myself being either bored, or annoyed by what happened in the book, and I didn't like his writing either, so I ditched it after about one hundred pages.
Nonetheless, "A man in full" is somewhere on my mental to-read list.

I recently read a book by Hesse, though not Siddhartha, but "Under the wheels" (or whatever it might be called in English), and found that to be quite an enjoyable, though a bit depressing. Obviously its meaning is to some extent outdated now, at least here in Norway, but that's alright. I have plans to explore his bibliography further.

The Stranger? Damn, I read that just a month or two ago and loved it! I'd read "The Plague" last year too, which I liked better. But then, we Scandinavians are known for being gothy cucumbers anyways.

On The Road was fun for a while, but I found myself starting to lose interest after a while, though at least it was a quick read. No urge to read anything more by him, but I'm still glad I've read it. I bet it'd be a lot more appealing if I was the kind of person who gets kindled into "duuude, I should go on a roadtrip and have like a TOTALLY wicked time!" thoughts.

Meanwhile, I just asked the local library to order me "Trout fishing in America." Hopefully it's as good as some claim, and not going to bug me like I suspect it will.

P.S. leave Brautigan alone.

Oystein, In english Hesse's book is called Beneath The Wheel, and that book and his Demian helped keep me sane at a time when i really needed the help.

Remove TOE MAIL?? Isn't that, like incredibly PAINFUL?!?!!!?! Whoever said bookreaders are wimps?

Seriously, my senior AP English class shouldn't have been centered around Crime and Punishment, Hamlet and The Stranger. (among others) God only knows how much psychological damage was done.

And fuck it, all these writers wrote stuff that I can still read and enjoy today. Yes, Kerouac would probably give me the hardest time there, but that's got an awful lot to do with the fact that he was the first writer I had that violently sympathetic reaction to, he was burnt into my imagination earlier, and somehow deeper, than all the rest. Sure, of everyone, his books probably *are* the weakest in the main. Way too sentimental and that err, 'hip' style of his really grates now (my God though, imagine what it would have been like to read him in the 50s!). But Big Sur remains an amazing and scary book, and I'd still take the charm of Dharma Bums over anything and everything old Poo-poo Hemingway ever wrote.

Øystein, with Hesse, Demian and Steppenwolf were really the two great books for me. I have a feeling that if I were to go to that shelf now though, it'd be one of his sadder, more pastoral things I'd go for - Knulp or Klingsor's Last Summer.

Damn, remember how books could once be so life-changing?

As alluded to by others, it's not that I necessarily dislike Tom Robbins now, although I haven't (and probably won't) read his last three. It's more that I no longer view him as writing the map of my worldview in redheaded prose.

(ducks)

Well I wasn't "young" but I thought Don DeLillo was the bees knees in my 20s but now I look at his inscrutable prose and think '"what bollocks is he going on about?" and "C'mon Don, real people don't speak like telegrams"

I still love Tom Robbins, though his last three have been so horrid that I've resigned myself to not reading anything else he publishes.

Ah, yes me to. Took me far too long to understand that Heinlein was no friend to women. Although I will probably continue to reread "Number of the Beast" for the time-travel dipping into fictional worlds.

I loved Another Roadside Attraction. He had this simile that I couldn’t get out of my head: living near Puget Sound was like living inside "a salad with a washcloth on top.” Anyone that ever lived in Olympia would have to admit that that was a perfect description.