The Suck Fairy; bad books that were good

[sartorias]

Yesterday, Jo Walton talked about the Suck Fairy--when you revisit a book you remember as loving, and discover all the flaws you missed on that first read.

Oh, how I adored the Enid Blyton Adventure books as a little kid! But I was the audience she intended, so I just won't reread those books. I don't want to spoil the memory of crouching on the

Comments

[madrobins]

Oh, do I know the Suck Fairy. She nibbled away at a lot of the Graustarkian stuff I loved when I was a kid.

I do think the Suck Fairy has an older sister, very overworked and not quite as well known. I'm not sure she has a name, but she's the one who touches a book so that, if you go back and re-read it, you find wonderful things you'd forgotten, riches you skimmed right over when you were a kid. As I say, she's overworked and doesn't get the same kind of exposure as her younger, nastier sister.

[sartorias]

I love that one, I think of her as the Surprise Fairy.

[asakiyume]

I love that older sister; I've met up with her now and then.

[gategrrl]

Oh yeah.

The books I used to love when I was a kid were just so sloowwwww when I dragged them out for my daughter. She was not interested, even when I read them to her. They took *forever* to get going-and whoa. The gender roles were so outdated. Or rather, the attitudes. (I grew up in the 70s) I gave up on impressing my old favorites on her. She has her new ones. Twilight being on them, which mystifies me-since the female roles in it are worse or as bad as the ones in the books I used to read at her age.

Ah well.

(oh yes! CS Lewis' Narnia series. Loved it when I was kid. It had a LION in it, see? I adored lions. But I completely missed out on the Christian themes in it, since I wasn't raised anything! Now, I still enjoy the imagination in it, but NOT the antiquated way the girls were written, and the blatant Christianity in it)

[sartorias]

I love Lucy, even today.

And Voyage of the Dawn Treader still can make me tear up. But all books vary for readers!

[gategrrl]

I am so happy that Dawn Treader is the next movie in the series that they're going to film-that was my favorite one. And I agree about Lucy. It's almost like she jumped out of Lewis' head and had her OWN views and life. Reepacheep had my heart. What a rogue.

[sartorias]

Oh, I think Lewis gets some nasty press he doesn't quite deserve. Yes, Susan edited herself out of Narnia by choosing boys and makeup, but on the other hand, there is Till We Have Faces.

[whswhs]

Sad to say, I tried rereading some of the later Baum Oz books in adulthood, and the magic had gone away. I wish my library had had them in the 1950s, when I was of an age to appreciate them properly.

[sartorias]

Baum really gets his hooks in hard when you encounter him young.

[asakiyume]

What were some of your favorite Oz books? I really liked Glinda of Oz and Ozma of Oz.

[sartorias]

My favorite was the cross-dressing The Enchanted Isle of Yew, with its extraordinarily beautiful production values. (Though I did not encounter it as a kid, but as an 18 year old, visiting the special collections room at my university.)

[whswhs]

Having now looked at Walton's essay (thanks for the link), I want to mention a recent visit from the Trope Fairy: She flew through several television series I liked and inserted Virtuous Lesbians. I quite enjoyed seeing Kima as the voice of integrity on The Wire, and Liz on Nip Tuck, and Tara on Buffy: they were all portrayed as admirable in a way that I found convincing. But then my brain made the connection, and I just know that the next time I watch an episode with one of them I'll see the trope showing through the image of a real person.

[sartorias]

I think the older we get, the more tropes (or patterns) we perceive.

[asakiyume]

I've been lucky, I guess. There are stories that have faded with me over time and ones that, when I went back, were more pedestrian or more blatant or whatever than they seemed when I was a kid, but nothing that sort of hit me in a chest with suckiness. I guess I don't ever expect anything I've read as a kid to have been brilliant; I know that a good proportion of whatever I loved about a book was what happened in my mind as I was reading it--and that often was tangential to the book.

[sartorias]

Yeah--some have disappointed me, or the magic has leached out. But the Blytons really were a kick in the head.

[asakiyume]

See, I didn't read them as a kid, but I did read them as a grown-up, to my own kids (just the one or two mildewed copies hanging around at my in-laws house--I didn't have easy access to a library, and I wanted to read to the kids, so...)

I dunno, I guess I have a high tolerance for stereotypes? Or my expectations were really low? Or maybe there wasn't any super blatant racism in the ones I read? The kids enjoyed the adventures and played their own Famous Five games for a while.

I guess I was pretty confident that my own attitudes and opinions would offset any bad influence that the books might have in terms of stuff like racism, sexism, or xenophobia.