What books did you once love, that you cringe to remember?

atlas-shrugged-e1333630955708The Awl asks, and Sam Anderson of the NYT Magazine channels a young Blattman:

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.

It helps to be a middle class white male from an upwardly mobile family who has never faced a real obstacle in his life harder than a suburban fast food job where you actually had to do something dirty for the first time in your life. But if you go from cleaning a grease trap to A’s in college, then obviously you’re superman.

Meanwhile, to the list of cringeworthy things I used to love reading, I will add opinion pieces by The Economist (for similar reasons).

18 Responses

  1. Oh man, yeah, The Economist. I remember vividly watching them be so terribly wrong on Dubya and asking myself if that meant they were wrong about everything else.

    Of course, they are.

  2. Atlas shrugged used to be my favorite book in college and is still now after a decade. I feel that with time people adjust to life and become “mature” so they loose their idealistic touch. It is then that they start to loose connect with Ayn Rand.
    I still proudly lend my Atlas Shrugged on Lenro (http://lenro.co) nearly every month, just to spread Ayn Rand’s message :)

  3. You’ve seen this joke, right?

    “”There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

  4. Ooh, rich vein here. Hermann Hesse has to be up there – Glass Bead Game? Ouch. And don’t get me started on Black Sabbath…..