I've read NotB and Friday ...can't remember much about them though.

Cover-to-cover????

Twice. Just in case.

I'm not a brackety person, but I definitely accept them in this situation, even if I brought that pain all on myself.

All I've read is Stranger and I hated it. But I read it relatively recently, a few years ago, as one of those books that you've been meaning to read for 15 years and never go to things. So there may be something to the notion that there's a time and a place for some books, and hitting it younger might've worked better.

OTOH, several of the books that a lot of people seem to consider seminal or life-changing left me cold. Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker, etc., so maybe it just isn't my thing.

Now I'm afraid to finally go and read that copy of Citizen of the Galaxy that's been sitting in a storage box for 15 years.

I think Glory Road is fun.

I think it's fun right up to, but not including the point where the hero spanks the heroine for contradicting him in front of company, in spite of the fact that a) she knew what was what and he didn't and b) he'd just screwed up big time. At which point he became less of a hero and more of an ignorant bully But I loved the opening chapters.

Saw COMM and had to come join the RAH-hate. Just kidding. Not.

I think I would be far more able to live-and-let-live with Heinlein's oddball/provocative ideas if he actually gave flesh to anything more than the idea. He gets more points than Isaac Asimov, because he can actually construct a sentence with a subordinate clause, but Heinlein's characters don't tend to have anything but what the plot/ideology demands of them. There's a particular character moment near the end of Starship Troopers that made me absolutely HOWL with laughter in its ludicrous stupidity.

Ideology is like medicine -- a lot easier to take when hidden in the literary equivalent of ice cream. (Or cheese, if you're a dog.)

I gather that this weakness of Heinlein's, and possibly his complete inability not to summarize action rather than depict it, is also a symptom of his genre at that time. All I can say to that is, All Hail New Wave! As annoying as a in-genre "movement" can occasionally be, I can't complain when the end-result is fiction I can read and actually call fiction.

I think the timing is key for liking Heinlein/finding him profound.

I have this same response to Ayn Rand. I just think there are author's you read and you think "Oh. Yeah. Deep. Model for my life." and then you grow up and realize, "Huh. Crappy."

I worry about rereading Hermann Hesse for just this reason.

I have this same response to Ayn Rand.

Man. If I had a nickel for every meat head in a Co-ed Naked Wrestling t-shirt who had some life-changing epiphany after reading The Fountainhead, I could take a year off of work.

I worry about rereading Hermann Hesse for just this reason.

Be grateful you aren't rereading Fu Manchu. It didn't start out great, and man, is it worse when you aren't an adolescent.

I think my Ayn Rand issue (and Tim, frankly, I don't give a shit if you think she's brilliant. You're wrong.) rests around the idea that her whole philosophy was justification for behavior that was juvenile and selfish, unnecessarily self-important and self-indulgent and just generally crappy.

Betsy, huh? Fu Manchu?