Books that make you cringe
The Awl has this fun feature on books that make you cringe to remember - "first book crushes" that now, to take the metaphor further, make you turn away and pretend to check your shoes when you come across them on the street.
There's quite a bit of On the Road and Ayn Rand in there. Stephen King too, but I wouldn't lump him in with the "cringe" stuff...for every bloated super-long horror-in-a-small-town story (e.g. The Tommyknockers, Needful Things), he has something powerful and affecting in a primal way. (My faves include The Shining, Carrie and of course the masterful brilliant fabulous great Misery).
But there *are* some books that I cringe to remember now...chief among them is V.C. Andrews epic of incest, the Dollanganger series. I read them all, MULTIPLE times: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind,If There Be Thorns and the prequel, Garden of Shadows. (I kind of wised up and didn't read Seeds of Yesterday anymore.) I loved them so much and got my little sister hooked on these too. These books were melodramatic and had minor "sex scenes" that my preteen self could handle comfortably (never mind if they were between a brother and sister, shudder!!) as well as plot points that made perfect sense to a budding writer: the perfect blonde and blue-eyed family with the doll-like features, aptly named the Dollangangers (poetic!), the sexy swan bed in the gloomy manor that gets everyone all hot and bothered for some reason (metaphor!), a recurring inter-generational penchant for seclusion and child abuse (continuing plot devices!), stunted dwarf twins killed by donuts laced with arsenic (tragedy!) - it just seemed so interesting to me. Now my sister and I talk about it and we're like, "How the hell were these ever marketed to kids." They're seriously, epically twisted. And written in a highly wrought soap opera manner, which kind of trumps the twisted subject matter in the scale of repulsiveness.
Another book I cringe to remember is The Alchemist. I read this the month I graduated college, and the central theme - how everything works out for a reason and how, if you really want something, the Universe conspires for you to get it, really appealed to my confused, "welcome to the real world" 20-year-old heart. It was so wise! It was such a simple way to view life and its obstacles! And then a couple of years later I learned that Paulo Coelho is actually a pretty heavy and open drug user and suddenly all those wise and mystical and penetrating observations all seem like the profound musings one makes when one has smoked too many joints, and yeah, the bloom is off THAT rose.
Which books do YOU cringe to remember?
There's quite a bit of On the Road and Ayn Rand in there. Stephen King too, but I wouldn't lump him in with the "cringe" stuff...for every bloated super-long horror-in-a-small-town story (e.g. The Tommyknockers, Needful Things), he has something powerful and affecting in a primal way. (My faves include The Shining, Carrie and of course the masterful brilliant fabulous great Misery).
But there *are* some books that I cringe to remember now...chief among them is V.C. Andrews epic of incest, the Dollanganger series. I read them all, MULTIPLE times: Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind,If There Be Thorns and the prequel, Garden of Shadows. (I kind of wised up and didn't read Seeds of Yesterday anymore.) I loved them so much and got my little sister hooked on these too. These books were melodramatic and had minor "sex scenes" that my preteen self could handle comfortably (never mind if they were between a brother and sister, shudder!!) as well as plot points that made perfect sense to a budding writer: the perfect blonde and blue-eyed family with the doll-like features, aptly named the Dollangangers (poetic!), the sexy swan bed in the gloomy manor that gets everyone all hot and bothered for some reason (metaphor!), a recurring inter-generational penchant for seclusion and child abuse (continuing plot devices!), stunted dwarf twins killed by donuts laced with arsenic (tragedy!) - it just seemed so interesting to me. Now my sister and I talk about it and we're like, "How the hell were these ever marketed to kids." They're seriously, epically twisted. And written in a highly wrought soap opera manner, which kind of trumps the twisted subject matter in the scale of repulsiveness.
Another book I cringe to remember is The Alchemist. I read this the month I graduated college, and the central theme - how everything works out for a reason and how, if you really want something, the Universe conspires for you to get it, really appealed to my confused, "welcome to the real world" 20-year-old heart. It was so wise! It was such a simple way to view life and its obstacles! And then a couple of years later I learned that Paulo Coelho is actually a pretty heavy and open drug user and suddenly all those wise and mystical and penetrating observations all seem like the profound musings one makes when one has smoked too many joints, and yeah, the bloom is off THAT rose.
Which books do YOU cringe to remember?
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