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Re-reading books from my youth


DougGraves

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I got a gift certificate to Amazon and am using it to buy ebooks that I can't get from the library.  Mostly books I read when I was a teenager and loved but have not read since.  And the results have been mixed.

 

Conan - I still love.  Fast paced, lots of action.  Endings are dramatic.  The attitudes are certainly from 100 years ago, but the stories hold up.

 

Fafhrd and the Grey Mousesr - Very mixed.  Lots more telling than showing.  Some stories I just found too boring, a few were still good.  After one book I did not feel the need to read more.

 

Thieve's World - I can't stand these stories now.  They are supposed to be gritty, but they feel like the authors are just substituting grit for story and character.  I am so disappointed, because loved the books as a teenager but could not even finish one book now.

 

Conclusion - teenagers and old men have very different tastes.

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There are a few books I read avidly in my youth that I know my older self would hate, notably Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series and Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series.  Even just typing them out brings a grimace to my face.  Pure escapism, and I have no doubt that the more "adult" aspects of the former (maybe both?) would make me grimace even more.  But to give credit where it's due, the Wrinkle books may very well have jump-started my brain into thinking about seriously weird s**t.

 

On the flip side, I'm still digging pretty much anything by Jules Verne. H.G. Wells, and JRR Tolkien (plus all the stuff his son kept burping out).  On the flip side of the flip side, I didn't like the Dune books when I was younger, and now that I'm older, I can see why.  Plus, I'm not as fond of Asimov and Clarke as I once was - although I might re-read the Rama books.

 

I read 1984 in, well, 1984, and re-read it a couple of years ago.  I liked it then, but didn't realize how deep it was.  All I really remembered from the first read was big loud TVs everywhere with Big Brother's face on them.

 

Childhood and teenage classics that I've been meaning to re-read and just never do include the Earthsea books and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  Maybe someday.

 

One book I shouldn't have read as a kid and doubt I'll read again is Satan, his Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S.

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I started reading Terry Pratchett books when I was a teenager and still do re-read them.

Except for Shepherd's Crown. Which is the last one.

Which... I don't wanna.

Because then there wouldn't be any more to come.

It's stupid, I know, but... somehow it helps.

 

Also, recently cleaned my Mum's house and found she'd been hiding boxes of stuff from when I was a kid. Hopefully I get to sit down with my great-nieces and do Asterix (with voices, natch, the same way I did for their mum 18 years ago.) 

WAKE UP YA MISCREANTS AND... HEY, GET YOUR OWN DAMN SIGNATURE.

Look out for me being generally cool, stylish and funny (delete as applicable) on Excelsior.

 

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I still love everything Anne McCaffrey wrote.  Barbara Hambly's Windrose trilogy hasn't lost any of its magic for me, either.

 

The Piers Anthony novels I enjoyed as an adolescent, though, come across as obsessed with sex, poorly veiled pedophilia in many cases, and not as scintillating as they seemed to my younger self.  Some of what he wrote is still interesting and imaginative, but even the good material is overshadowed, in my estimation, by his failure to reign in his erotomania.

 

The AD&D novels that fired my imagination and filled me with wonder, though, come across as bad fanfic now.  The only reason most of them were even published was because they were in-house.  With all of the grammatical and spelling errors, and the childish writing, no respectable publisher would've ever given the manuscripts a second glance.

 

These days, I spend most of my reading time on subjects like building a brick oven, heating water without electricity, dam engineering and hydrodynamics and other things applicable to improving my life in the cabin, so I don't revisit the books from my past (other than McCaffrey/Hambly novels, which i re-read annually).

Get busy living... or get busy dying.  That's goddamn right.

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Boy Piers Anthony - yeah, Xanth is fun stories as a kid.  On a Pale Horse was fantastic.  But the pedophilia was strong in so much of his works.  I have avoided them.

 

I loved Anne McCaffrey but have avoided re-reading them, worried they would not hold up.  I should try them though.

 

The D&D novels I read as a young adult.  There were a few I enjoyed a lot.  Rather than seeing them as poorly written, they clearly spelled out how overpowered D&D spellcasters were as the fighters became useless and the spellcasters became like gods.

 

I read the first Dune book and did not like it.  I've never been a fan of chosen ones born with great powers and abilities.  I also can't stand Ender's Game.

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1 hour ago, DougGraves said:

Boy Piers Anthony - yeah, Xanth is fun stories as a kid.  On a Pale Horse was fantastic.  But the pedophilia was strong in so much of his works.  I have avoided them.

 

In revisited the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the Tarot series, the Mode series, the Apprentice Adept series and the Incarnations of Immortality series a couple of years ago, when all I had was a tablet and not much else to do but read.  It was an eye-opening experience, having read all of them decades ago and seeing them in this light now.  Rings of Ice held up well to the test of time, and I do believe he's a good science fiction writer in general, but being bludgeoned by his libido in so many books took all of the charm out of them and left me wishing I hadn't re-read them.

 

2 hours ago, DougGraves said:

I loved Anne McCaffrey but have avoided re-reading them, worried they would not hold up.  I should try them though.

 

The conclusion to the Freedom trilogy felt strangely out of pace with the other two stories in that series, like it was rushed to print before she'd finished it.  I had a similar feeling about the final Crystal Singer novel, Crystal Line, it just took an entirely different tone from the preceding novels and left me wondering if I was reading something from a different author.  And the end of the Talent series, The Tower and The Hive, relegated The Rowan to a background character, which irked me.  It was still good, but it wasn't The Rowan good.

 

But everything else still hit me in the same way it did the first time.  I blazed through all of the Dragonrider, Talents, Dinosaur Planet/Planet Pirate and Brainship novels and they held up really well, despite having read some of them for the first time over 35 years ago.

 

Her son took over the Dragonriders franchise after she died... I can't say he's carrying the torch well.  I didn't enjoy any of his entries.  I don't recommend them, though you might take something away from the experience of reading his works in comparison to hers.

 

I also delved into the Acorna series.  I don't think McCaffrey contributed anything but a name on the covers.  The writing style is definitely not hers, and the quality isn't even on par with the weakest of her works.  Avoid this series.

Get busy living... or get busy dying.  That's goddamn right.

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  • 4 weeks later

Once we get a new house, I'll be able to unpack my library that I've spent a lifetime collecting.

Crystal Singer was one of the first books I bought for myself (outside of Scholastic Books anyway). Spent years buying books through the Sci-Fi book club. I look forward to reading them all over again when they're all unpacked... all 800 of them...    Granted I have 4 sets of encyclopedias, I probably won't be re-reading those.    <.<

 

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Dislike certain sounds? Silence/Modify specific sounds. Looking for modified whole powerset sfx?

Check out Michiyo's modder or Solerverse's thread.  Got a punny character? You should share it.

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