21 Books You Don't Have To Read
April 26, 2018 2:04 PM Subscribe
GQ lists 21 books we are all supposed to read (if we want to be considered well read), and suggests we skip them for the alternatives they suggest. A sample:
Mark Twain was a racist. Just read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was a man of his time, so let's leave him there. We don't need him. If you want adventure, or misadventure, read The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis. It's one of my favorite books: sad, poetic, philosophical, and funny, with some of the best writing I've read.
The pull quote from this article, I think, is not going to help this go well...
posted by Going To Maine at 2:12 PM on April 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
posted by Going To Maine at 2:12 PM on April 26, 2018 [29 favorites]
I just embrace putting books down if they suck... There's no point in agonizing about what to read beforehand. Go to the library and have fun.
posted by selfnoise at 2:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [20 favorites]
posted by selfnoise at 2:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [20 favorites]
I've seen some incredibly bad takes in my life, but "don't read Vonnegut because I've been on some bad dates" is a doozy.
posted by Random_Tangent at 2:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [61 favorites]
posted by Random_Tangent at 2:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [61 favorites]
Far be it from me to argue with the Content gods, but I think this is gonna go a little like Ortberg bluffing about Russian novels. You don't have to read anything! You should, however, try reading things. Things you might like! Things you might not like! And if you really hate what you've chosen....no one says you have to finish it.
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by grandiloquiet at 2:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
Having read the whole article, I think that most pull quotes would work out about the same. Like this choice one about the Bible:
Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced. It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.
I mean... yeah? But I don't think that's why people read the Bible. Even when they read it as literature, they are not reading it in a way in which you can really swap it for another book.
I like this list as a whole because it mostly swaps "canon" men for better women. But it's full of fighty bits. Like that Gravity's Rainbow and by extension WWII just isn't that relevant anymore.
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced. It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.
I mean... yeah? But I don't think that's why people read the Bible. Even when they read it as literature, they are not reading it in a way in which you can really swap it for another book.
I like this list as a whole because it mostly swaps "canon" men for better women. But it's full of fighty bits. Like that Gravity's Rainbow and by extension WWII just isn't that relevant anymore.
posted by tofu_crouton at 2:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
I just embrace putting books down if they suck... There's no point in agonizing about what to read beforehand. Go to the library and have fun.Yeah, I used to be a lot more stern and completist about finishing books I picked up, but over the years I've lost that patience; or, put another way, over the years I've recognized my increasingly limited time left in the realms of the living and begun to prioritize my valuable time and mental energy.
posted by inconstant at 2:17 PM on April 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
I don't know about most of this list but The Sisters Brothers is indeed a really, really good book. Got some quiet time to read this summer? Definitely pick it up.
posted by GuyZero at 2:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by GuyZero at 2:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
As someone who routinely dropkicks books off my balcony the second they fail to impress me, I LOVE this trend of characterizing abandoning books as something almost Zen-like and disciplined... because that's totally the reason I stop reading books I don't like... yes...
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 2:21 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 2:21 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
Holy crap, *somebody* is pretty comfortable having opinions... I mean that's fine, but if you're going to explicitly replace 70% of all Salinger novels in a list of 21 books (and that's defining novel loosely) I'll say maybe that's just you? So definitely go ahead and suggest a replacement for the fucking Bible next :p
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 2:24 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 2:24 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Looks like there are some interesting book recommendations. Now can someone do moby dick & the count of monte cristo?
posted by aniola at 2:25 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by aniola at 2:25 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
11. The Ambassadors by Henry James
Instead: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
I'd have thought that if the racism disqualifies a book, as it does in this list, then the homophobia of Shirer's book should disqualify it as well. He regularly cites being gay as among any Nazi's depravities.
posted by Beardman at 2:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
Instead: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
I'd have thought that if the racism disqualifies a book, as it does in this list, then the homophobia of Shirer's book should disqualify it as well. He regularly cites being gay as among any Nazi's depravities.
posted by Beardman at 2:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [15 favorites]
The problem with this list is the replacements don’t fix the problems listed for the original books. Like I can see why someone might read Earthsea over LoTR, but it’s definitely not for the supposed lack of prose descriptions.
posted by corb at 2:30 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by corb at 2:30 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
On the one hand, I like and am glad to have read the majority of the 21 books, but on the other I think the alternates almost all sound super interesting and I'm putting them on my list.
But:
1. Bleak House is incredibly fascinating and bizarre. You don't have to like it, but it's an astonishing novel - people think Dickens is all folksy-cute, but Bleak House is very creepy, sad and full of internal contradictions.
2. I don't think "but this is booooooorrrring" is very good criticism, even though we're all supposed to be spunky no-rules readers now. First, one person's "incredibly boring" is another's "ineluctably fascinating", and I don't think we can politick or modernity that difference away.
Second, "what makes something boring" is a really interesting question that reveals a lot about the cultural context. Third, there are a lot of things that you find boring when you're not ready for them, either because you're not a strong enough reader or because they don't yet speak to you, and then you encounter them later and they're wonderful. And fourth, for me there are a handful of books which are simultaneously extremely dull and extremely memorable (most notably The Floating World, by Celia Holland, and Frederick Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future)....Like, I can't contemplate reading them without a feeling of extraordinary ennui, and yet scenes and passages remain with me incredibly vividly and have influenced me a great deal.
3. A lot depends on why you're reading. If you're interested in WWI memoirs or the immediate post-war period in a scholarly way, you're very likely going to read Graves. In fact, if I could recommend a way to direct one's reading, it's "find a period, place, theme or subject that interests you and steer your readings that way". Books that are fucking annoying if you're reading them purely for kicks get a lot more interesting if you're reading them because, eg, your favorite author was best friends with the writer, or because they were influential in shaping a movement that you care about.
4. I do not like Too Loud A Solitude. I just don't. It's creepy and sexist in a way that seems to me characteristic of a lot of the "dissident" literature by men that is praised in the West. I mean, I'm not sorry I read it, because I gained by reading it, but I sure didn't like it.
Which leads me to 5: I try to avoid books that both seem likely to be really racist/sexist/bigoted and have no significance to my other interests, and I don't think that people should persist with books that make them feel bad or fulminatingly angry - like, I really dislike Milan Kundera and Robert Heinlein, and have no plans to read them for amusement ever again. But there are also a lot of books like Too Loud A Solitude which fall in the middle. I thought it was laughably sexist, but it was also well-written! I didn't really like its politics, but it was an interesting window on a time! So, I mean, I'm not sorry I read it even though I wasn't super into it, and there are a lot of books like that.
posted by Frowner at 2:31 PM on April 26, 2018 [34 favorites]
But:
1. Bleak House is incredibly fascinating and bizarre. You don't have to like it, but it's an astonishing novel - people think Dickens is all folksy-cute, but Bleak House is very creepy, sad and full of internal contradictions.
2. I don't think "but this is booooooorrrring" is very good criticism, even though we're all supposed to be spunky no-rules readers now. First, one person's "incredibly boring" is another's "ineluctably fascinating", and I don't think we can politick or modernity that difference away.
Second, "what makes something boring" is a really interesting question that reveals a lot about the cultural context. Third, there are a lot of things that you find boring when you're not ready for them, either because you're not a strong enough reader or because they don't yet speak to you, and then you encounter them later and they're wonderful. And fourth, for me there are a handful of books which are simultaneously extremely dull and extremely memorable (most notably The Floating World, by Celia Holland, and Frederick Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future)....Like, I can't contemplate reading them without a feeling of extraordinary ennui, and yet scenes and passages remain with me incredibly vividly and have influenced me a great deal.
3. A lot depends on why you're reading. If you're interested in WWI memoirs or the immediate post-war period in a scholarly way, you're very likely going to read Graves. In fact, if I could recommend a way to direct one's reading, it's "find a period, place, theme or subject that interests you and steer your readings that way". Books that are fucking annoying if you're reading them purely for kicks get a lot more interesting if you're reading them because, eg, your favorite author was best friends with the writer, or because they were influential in shaping a movement that you care about.
4. I do not like Too Loud A Solitude. I just don't. It's creepy and sexist in a way that seems to me characteristic of a lot of the "dissident" literature by men that is praised in the West. I mean, I'm not sorry I read it, because I gained by reading it, but I sure didn't like it.
Which leads me to 5: I try to avoid books that both seem likely to be really racist/sexist/bigoted and have no significance to my other interests, and I don't think that people should persist with books that make them feel bad or fulminatingly angry - like, I really dislike Milan Kundera and Robert Heinlein, and have no plans to read them for amusement ever again. But there are also a lot of books like Too Loud A Solitude which fall in the middle. I thought it was laughably sexist, but it was also well-written! I didn't really like its politics, but it was an interesting window on a time! So, I mean, I'm not sorry I read it even though I wasn't super into it, and there are a lot of books like that.
posted by Frowner at 2:31 PM on April 26, 2018 [34 favorites]
I'd respect a list that recommends skipping the Bible and replacing it with Life by Keith Richards.
posted by Beardman at 2:31 PM on April 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
posted by Beardman at 2:31 PM on April 26, 2018 [14 favorites]
Holy crap, *somebody* is pretty comfortable having opinions... I mean that's fine, but if you're going to explicitly replace 70% of all Salinger novels in a list of 21 books (and that's defining novel loosely) I'll say maybe that's just you? So definitely go ahead and suggest a replacement for the fucking Bible next :p
I guess you missed it when you read the article, but these are each by different authors. So it's actually two somebodies, and a third different person for The Bible.
I feel like, in part, this list is reacting to The American Canon - usually enacted through high school literature reading lists. I asked my nephew what he read for Honors English, and holy shit was that ever a boring list. Edifying? Eh... maybe... if you think that society and literature haven't changed since 1975 and that date is still 20 years past America's prime.
It's obviously clickbait, but it is nice to have some alternative selections for such a boring list of books.
I've seen some incredibly bad takes in my life, but "don't read Vonnegut because I've been on some bad dates" is a doozy.
I think it's more that Vonnegut was a misogynist who's writing is about as deep as a puddle of spilled Miller Lite, but I suppose that's open to interpretation.
posted by codacorolla at 2:32 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I guess you missed it when you read the article, but these are each by different authors. So it's actually two somebodies, and a third different person for The Bible.
I feel like, in part, this list is reacting to The American Canon - usually enacted through high school literature reading lists. I asked my nephew what he read for Honors English, and holy shit was that ever a boring list. Edifying? Eh... maybe... if you think that society and literature haven't changed since 1975 and that date is still 20 years past America's prime.
It's obviously clickbait, but it is nice to have some alternative selections for such a boring list of books.
I've seen some incredibly bad takes in my life, but "don't read Vonnegut because I've been on some bad dates" is a doozy.
I think it's more that Vonnegut was a misogynist who's writing is about as deep as a puddle of spilled Miller Lite, but I suppose that's open to interpretation.
posted by codacorolla at 2:32 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I never could get into Joseph Heller's Catch-22. It fails to capture the absurdities and impossible conflicts of war.
Wow. That screeching sound is me laughing incredulously at that second sentence.
posted by Jackson at 2:35 PM on April 26, 2018 [99 favorites]
Wow. That screeching sound is me laughing incredulously at that second sentence.
posted by Jackson at 2:35 PM on April 26, 2018 [99 favorites]
I've seen some incredibly bad takes in my life, but "don't read Vonnegut because I've been on some bad dates" is a doozy.
That's not what it says at all. Maybe you should take a gander at the recommended books.
posted by watermelon at 2:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
That's not what it says at all. Maybe you should take a gander at the recommended books.
posted by watermelon at 2:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'm just not going to be super judgy about the books a person has read or hasn't read.
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Dickens is all folksy-cute
That...is not what Dickensian means.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:49 PM on April 26, 2018 [37 favorites]
That...is not what Dickensian means.
posted by schadenfrau at 2:49 PM on April 26, 2018 [37 favorites]
A lot of this article is nonsense, but I'll put Dorothy Strachey's Olivia on my to-read list anyway.
posted by kyrademon at 3:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by kyrademon at 3:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
I think only adolescents and snobs get worked up by must read literature. It seems obvious that there is more excellent writing written than one person could ever read in a lifetime. This thing with the vigorous sorting and opinion manufacture is not something the world particularly needs. I cannot imagine taking seriously someone who felt that a person was unread if they hadn't read a particular set of culturally specific books, I do know that wanting to share what you have read and enjoyed is as natural as smiling. This bit of content feels like a mashup of the two. It doesn't taste very good. (not to be judgmental or anything.)
posted by Pembquist at 3:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Pembquist at 3:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Despite being an English professor, I'm completely on board with people ceasing to read something that bores them.* After all, I often can't cease reading whatever happens to be boring me at the time ("this Victorian novel about the Disruption of 1843 lacks narrative tension"). What baffled me about this list was the frequent randomness of the suggestions: some of the alternatives were in the same genre or on the same topic; some were...just different books, and not necessarily better ones. And after years of listening to eighteenth-century specialists describe what happens when they teach Tristram Shandy (occasionally the students are happy; more often they aren't), I guffawed when I got to the suggestion that it's somehow more readable than Gulliver's Travels. (I like TS! But it's kind of difficult!)
*--OK, I may have shaken my fist at the sky when I saw the bit about Bleak House, a.k.a. one of the two greatest English novels of the Victorian period (the other being Middlemarch).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:11 PM on April 26, 2018 [21 favorites]
*--OK, I may have shaken my fist at the sky when I saw the bit about Bleak House, a.k.a. one of the two greatest English novels of the Victorian period (the other being Middlemarch).
posted by thomas j wise at 3:11 PM on April 26, 2018 [21 favorites]
If you'd like to do that Zen thing where you drop boring literature from your life and read something engaging and funny and insightful instead, I can't recommend highly enough that you put down The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll and go read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn instead
posted by billjings at 3:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [23 favorites]
posted by billjings at 3:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [23 favorites]
Wait, Mark Twain was a racist?
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 3:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by a power-tie-wearing she-capitalist at 3:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
MetaFilter: A lot of this article is nonsense, but...
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:16 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Something I don't need to read, and regret reading: clickbait designed to start fights.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:17 PM on April 26, 2018 [27 favorites]
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 3:17 PM on April 26, 2018 [27 favorites]
This seems like a pretty great exercise unfortunately marred by super-clickbait-y editorial framing.
It's 20 "Classics" that 21 different contributors - whose bona fides don't really need to be questioned and who are largely not of the "privileged white male" perspective - didn't like as much as their reputation suggests one should, and 21 books - largely also by non-privileged-white-male folks - they think are worth checking out.
I also love Vonnegut and find Huckleberry Finn worthwhile. This didn't change my mind but it did give me some different opinions and books to check out.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
It's 20 "Classics" that 21 different contributors - whose bona fides don't really need to be questioned and who are largely not of the "privileged white male" perspective - didn't like as much as their reputation suggests one should, and 21 books - largely also by non-privileged-white-male folks - they think are worth checking out.
I also love Vonnegut and find Huckleberry Finn worthwhile. This didn't change my mind but it did give me some different opinions and books to check out.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [8 favorites]
so, what kind of guitar does aspley cherry-garrard play?
posted by pyramid termite at 3:26 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by pyramid termite at 3:26 PM on April 26, 2018
I think only adolescents and snobs get worked up by must read literature.
My main problem with "must read" literature, is the imperative (enforced by an educational system that devalues the humanities) that people "must read" it. This incredibly boring canon, developed for the most part 50 years ago, is still taught as a way of engaging with and understanding literature. The next time you're in a local library in summer, see if you can find their 'required reading' display. Apart from a few new additions, it's going to look a whole hell of a lot like the stuff in the article. Coupled with a literary approach that's about drawing obtuse meaning out of books that have been worn down to bone with analysis, you get whole generations of students who grow to hate reading fiction. These books aren't boring simply for stylistic reasons - they're boring because they're essentially wallpaper at this point.
posted by codacorolla at 3:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
My main problem with "must read" literature, is the imperative (enforced by an educational system that devalues the humanities) that people "must read" it. This incredibly boring canon, developed for the most part 50 years ago, is still taught as a way of engaging with and understanding literature. The next time you're in a local library in summer, see if you can find their 'required reading' display. Apart from a few new additions, it's going to look a whole hell of a lot like the stuff in the article. Coupled with a literary approach that's about drawing obtuse meaning out of books that have been worn down to bone with analysis, you get whole generations of students who grow to hate reading fiction. These books aren't boring simply for stylistic reasons - they're boring because they're essentially wallpaper at this point.
posted by codacorolla at 3:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Because the best way to get humans not to do something is to tell them not to do it...
posted by eustacescrubb at 3:32 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by eustacescrubb at 3:32 PM on April 26, 2018
I just can't with Bleak House, and I tried. I think we need better categories for fiction. Chicklit is misogynist. Women are expected to read Hemingway; men should be expected to read Laurie Colwin. I've read some Anthony Powell (I need a long train ride to read more, probably), may I suggest some Margaret Drabble? I love this sort of clickbait, but the layout didn't get me to click the replacements, so Fail, I guess.
posted by theora55 at 3:42 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by theora55 at 3:42 PM on April 26, 2018
> "... you get whole generations of students who grow to hate reading fiction."
Sometimes I wonder how much my love of literature comes from having gone to a really, really crappy high school. The only novel I was ever assigned back then was The Scarlet Letter. That was it. So it's pretty much the only book I've ever read that wasn't by choice, or in some cases assigned in a college class that I almost certainly chose because I liked the reading list, which probably amounts to much the same thing.
Some of the "boring classics" I've chosen to read I also found boring, and some of them I've found astonishingly brilliant, but I wonder how many of the astonishingly brilliant ones I'd also have found boring if I were forced to read them against my will and then pretend they were some kind of titanic cypher of symbolism used to conceal a one-sentence theme.
posted by kyrademon at 3:50 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Sometimes I wonder how much my love of literature comes from having gone to a really, really crappy high school. The only novel I was ever assigned back then was The Scarlet Letter. That was it. So it's pretty much the only book I've ever read that wasn't by choice, or in some cases assigned in a college class that I almost certainly chose because I liked the reading list, which probably amounts to much the same thing.
Some of the "boring classics" I've chosen to read I also found boring, and some of them I've found astonishingly brilliant, but I wonder how many of the astonishingly brilliant ones I'd also have found boring if I were forced to read them against my will and then pretend they were some kind of titanic cypher of symbolism used to conceal a one-sentence theme.
posted by kyrademon at 3:50 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
#BleakHouse
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 3:58 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 3:58 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Catcher in the Rye is a book I wish we had read in school and that I wish I could have re-read as an adult for a better perspective. I've read lots of things over the years referencing it or dissecting it. Without having read it, I feel like I totally understand why they have kids read it in school.
The Bible substitution is curious to me. I guess I'm maybe interpreting this list incorrectly, as if the recommend books were in the same vein as the one they're saying not to read, but at this point in the list, I'm starting to think it is just recommendations of good books, not necessarily replacements in some fashion.
Really, the only thing on this list to ruffle any of my feathers is Lord of the Rings, if only because the suggested replacement is one of a billion Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds that blends in with the others I vaguely remember from my fantasy phases. To be fair, I'd have to say the same of literally every fantasy novel series I've read or loved, with the exception of maybe Discworld.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:59 PM on April 26, 2018
The Bible substitution is curious to me. I guess I'm maybe interpreting this list incorrectly, as if the recommend books were in the same vein as the one they're saying not to read, but at this point in the list, I'm starting to think it is just recommendations of good books, not necessarily replacements in some fashion.
Really, the only thing on this list to ruffle any of my feathers is Lord of the Rings, if only because the suggested replacement is one of a billion Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds that blends in with the others I vaguely remember from my fantasy phases. To be fair, I'd have to say the same of literally every fantasy novel series I've read or loved, with the exception of maybe Discworld.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:59 PM on April 26, 2018
Wait, Mark Twain was a racist?
Pretty much everyone before, well a couple years ago, as far back as the 1800's it was accepted science.
Lotta folks were pretty mean to kitties too.
posted by sammyo at 4:10 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Pretty much everyone before, well a couple years ago, as far back as the 1800's it was accepted science.
Lotta folks were pretty mean to kitties too.
posted by sammyo at 4:10 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Wait, what, arguing about that definitive journal of academic literature: GQ
(sheesh)
posted by sammyo at 4:13 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
(sheesh)
posted by sammyo at 4:13 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I'm impressed that the GQ editors found a way to make ranked media listicles even more loathsome
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [17 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [17 favorites]
Catcher in the Rye is a book I wish we had read in school and that I wish I could have re-read as an adult for a better perspective.
I think Catcher really resonates with some kids. Yeah, the book has its flaws. But man, after she read it my daughter spent the next year calling everybody "phonies" and I think the book really affected her.
I'm impressed that the GQ editors found a way to make ranked media listicles even more loathsome
Here are 21 Zamfir tracks you should listen to instead of reading the Western Canon!
posted by GuyZero at 4:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think Catcher really resonates with some kids. Yeah, the book has its flaws. But man, after she read it my daughter spent the next year calling everybody "phonies" and I think the book really affected her.
I'm impressed that the GQ editors found a way to make ranked media listicles even more loathsome
Here are 21 Zamfir tracks you should listen to instead of reading the Western Canon!
posted by GuyZero at 4:15 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
GoblinHoney: "Really, the only thing on this list to ruffle any of my feathers is Lord of the Rings, if only because the suggested replacement is one of a billion Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds that blends in with the others I vaguely remember from my fantasy phases. To be fair, I'd have to say the same of literally every fantasy novel series I've read or loved, with the exception of maybe Discworld."
I don't think you can talk about Ursula K LeGuin like that on Metafilter. I'm like 90% sure it's in the rules.
posted by TypographicalError at 4:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [47 favorites]
I don't think you can talk about Ursula K LeGuin like that on Metafilter. I'm like 90% sure it's in the rules.
posted by TypographicalError at 4:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [47 favorites]
I should probably ignore this, since it's just a silly listicle, but I feel compelled to comment on a few that I have read (you win, GQ).
#5: The Alchemist is completely pretentious and vapid. I haven't read the alternative, but I'm 100% confident that it is better than The Alchemist based on the fact that it is not The Alchemist.
#7: I found Blood Meridian to be absolutely phenomenal. That being said, the criticism in the article is not wrong - the book is written in a beautiful but difficult style and definitely does not provide any "pleasure" to the reader. I've never read The Sisters Brothers, so I might be off the mark, but based on what the article says it sounds absolutely nothing like Blood Meridian other than being a violent story set in the same era. The idea that Blood Meridian is interchangeable with a book that is described as "human-scaled" and "funny" seems to miss the point of the it entirely. People should absolutely feel free to put the book down and read something else if they find the writing too dense or the content too disturbing (or if they just don't like it for any reason, really), but they shouldn't be deceived into thinking that it is similar to a dark comedy Western, when it is really more of an anti-Western and an indictment of the Old West and manifest destiny.
#14: The Lord of the Rings is far from amazingly written, but it is even further from "barely readable." Also, "Le Guin's books are more influential" - am I misunderstanding that part? I'm sure plenty of authors have been influenced by the Earthsea books, but I find it hard to believe that it (or any other modern fantasy series) is more influential than LotR.
posted by jv776 at 4:23 PM on April 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
#5: The Alchemist is completely pretentious and vapid. I haven't read the alternative, but I'm 100% confident that it is better than The Alchemist based on the fact that it is not The Alchemist.
#7: I found Blood Meridian to be absolutely phenomenal. That being said, the criticism in the article is not wrong - the book is written in a beautiful but difficult style and definitely does not provide any "pleasure" to the reader. I've never read The Sisters Brothers, so I might be off the mark, but based on what the article says it sounds absolutely nothing like Blood Meridian other than being a violent story set in the same era. The idea that Blood Meridian is interchangeable with a book that is described as "human-scaled" and "funny" seems to miss the point of the it entirely. People should absolutely feel free to put the book down and read something else if they find the writing too dense or the content too disturbing (or if they just don't like it for any reason, really), but they shouldn't be deceived into thinking that it is similar to a dark comedy Western, when it is really more of an anti-Western and an indictment of the Old West and manifest destiny.
#14: The Lord of the Rings is far from amazingly written, but it is even further from "barely readable." Also, "Le Guin's books are more influential" - am I misunderstanding that part? I'm sure plenty of authors have been influenced by the Earthsea books, but I find it hard to believe that it (or any other modern fantasy series) is more influential than LotR.
posted by jv776 at 4:23 PM on April 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
Whether you enjoyed it or not, suggesting that A Wizard of Earthsea is just one of a billion Tolkein-esque fantasy world that blends in with the others rather than a highly acclaimed and awarded and influential novel is, novel.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:24 PM on April 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:24 PM on April 26, 2018 [16 favorites]
I've seen some incredibly bad takes in my life, but "don't read Vonnegut because I've been on some bad dates" is a doozy
The only think wrong with this take is that she misspelled Bukowski.
posted by thivaia at 4:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
The only think wrong with this take is that she misspelled Bukowski.
posted by thivaia at 4:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
The arguments that Le Guin is more influential than Tolkien and that Le Guin is generic are both equally bananas.
The Earthsea books are a vast Taoist parable that somehow avoid being didactic or charmless and are among fantasy's greatest jewels.
posted by selfnoise at 4:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [24 favorites]
The Earthsea books are a vast Taoist parable that somehow avoid being didactic or charmless and are among fantasy's greatest jewels.
posted by selfnoise at 4:29 PM on April 26, 2018 [24 favorites]
FWIW, a response to the responses to the GQ list: "10 Things You Should Know About Lists on the Internet".
(I love lists like these just because I can keep adding to my to-read pile. Like, OK, trashtalk Catch-22 but that's not going to make me love it any less; thanks for the recommend on a book I hadn't heard of, I'll check it out YAY!)
posted by phonebia at 4:32 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
(I love lists like these just because I can keep adding to my to-read pile. Like, OK, trashtalk Catch-22 but that's not going to make me love it any less; thanks for the recommend on a book I hadn't heard of, I'll check it out YAY!)
posted by phonebia at 4:32 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
#7: I found Blood Meridian to be absolutely phenomenal. That being said, the criticism in the article is not wrong - the book is written in a beautiful but difficult style and definitely does not provide any "pleasure" to the reader.
Blood Meridian blew me away when I read it, I think that "beautiful but difficult style" is on the nose. There is also A Reader's Guide to Blood Meridian, which is a companion/annotation to the book. It really provided pleasure to my reread.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
Blood Meridian blew me away when I read it, I think that "beautiful but difficult style" is on the nose. There is also A Reader's Guide to Blood Meridian, which is a companion/annotation to the book. It really provided pleasure to my reread.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 4:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
Nobody disrespects Dracula on my watch and gets away with it.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
FWIW, a response to the responses to the GQ list: "10 Things You Should Know About Lists on the Internet".
being condescended to by a listicle writer was not exactly the perfect balm for my irritation
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
being condescended to by a listicle writer was not exactly the perfect balm for my irritation
posted by prize bull octorok at 4:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [12 favorites]
Tristram Shandy is one of the only books which I have started and not finished.
posted by clawsoon at 4:38 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by clawsoon at 4:38 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
I have never in real life met someone who judged people by what classic books they have read, and for this I am grateful. But it's very important on the internet to fight back against these people, who are apparently everywhere.
The inclusion of "Life" seems to mean this is a joke, right?
I'm confused.
posted by bongo_x at 4:41 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
The inclusion of "Life" seems to mean this is a joke, right?
I'm confused.
posted by bongo_x at 4:41 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I just embrace putting books down if they suck... There's no point in agonizing about what to read beforehand.
This is something that took me a long time to come around to. I was raised to "finish your plate", so to speak, and so for the first two decades of my reading life I considered books an investment (which, at $20 a throw, they certainly were) that required committing to. So I forced myself to finish them, even when they were not great.
But now, with ebooks especially, with (usually) a free 10+ page sample, they are, what, five bucks? Ten at most? (If they're more, wait until they're less.) And ten pages in, if it sucks, well, you didn't spend any money, and it gets deleted from your library and you never have to think about it again.
I do feel some guilt that I have locked myself into an Amazon ecosystem but in Australia there's not really any way around it, at least not if you want to be able to afford to read a book or two a week. But as late to the party as I was, the samples have been a game-changer for me, both economically and mentally.
That said, many of the "read these instead" recommendations in the GQ article could have easily been replaced with Candide by Voltaire, except for the Western novels, which would be replaced by Warlock by Oakley Hall, and everything else by Angela Carter. So I have spoken, so shall it be.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:54 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
This is something that took me a long time to come around to. I was raised to "finish your plate", so to speak, and so for the first two decades of my reading life I considered books an investment (which, at $20 a throw, they certainly were) that required committing to. So I forced myself to finish them, even when they were not great.
But now, with ebooks especially, with (usually) a free 10+ page sample, they are, what, five bucks? Ten at most? (If they're more, wait until they're less.) And ten pages in, if it sucks, well, you didn't spend any money, and it gets deleted from your library and you never have to think about it again.
I do feel some guilt that I have locked myself into an Amazon ecosystem but in Australia there's not really any way around it, at least not if you want to be able to afford to read a book or two a week. But as late to the party as I was, the samples have been a game-changer for me, both economically and mentally.
That said, many of the "read these instead" recommendations in the GQ article could have easily been replaced with Candide by Voltaire, except for the Western novels, which would be replaced by Warlock by Oakley Hall, and everything else by Angela Carter. So I have spoken, so shall it be.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:54 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Also Tristram Shandy was an absolute schemozzle. It could certainly replace Gulliver's Travels, but then should itself be replaced by nothing. Just staring at nothing and thinking about dogs.
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:58 PM on April 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by turbid dahlia at 4:58 PM on April 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
Just staring at nothing and thinking about dogs.
Coincidentally what I mostly did whilst reading Tristram Shandy.
posted by Celsius1414 at 5:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
Coincidentally what I mostly did whilst reading Tristram Shandy.
posted by Celsius1414 at 5:07 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
I really appreciate that a lot of the suggested replacements for very traditional American canonical works fall decidedly outside that framework. I enjoyed many of the books that are suggested for skipping, but I like having options that aren't just more white dudes. I appreciate having a variety of voices in my literature.
posted by chatongriffes at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by chatongriffes at 5:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
The Sisters Brothers is fantastic. That is all.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 5:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Every now and then , put down the book you are reading and go see a play. Especially, start following productions at nearby colleges and universities.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:28 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by SemiSalt at 5:28 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Wait, Mark Twain was a racist?
Quote from his letter to the dean of Yale Law School about supporting one of the school's first black students:
“We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.”
He went on to ask how to pay ''so that I may send 6, 12, or 24 months' board as the size of the bill may determine.''
This letter was written the same year Huckleberry Finn was published.
And he ended up footing the entire bill, until graduation.
posted by ecourbanist at 5:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [70 favorites]
Quote from his letter to the dean of Yale Law School about supporting one of the school's first black students:
“We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.”
He went on to ask how to pay ''so that I may send 6, 12, or 24 months' board as the size of the bill may determine.''
This letter was written the same year Huckleberry Finn was published.
And he ended up footing the entire bill, until graduation.
posted by ecourbanist at 5:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [70 favorites]
I say this not to convince those upthread to change their minds, but to offer a data point to those on the fence: Tristram Shandy is a monster page-turner that I've read three times.
The same for Bleak House, but only twice so far. That said, if you don't like Dickens, but want something with a really strong you-are-there-in-Victorian-London quality, I recommend Arthur Morrison's The Hole in the Wall. It's short and very gripping.
in a regular way. not like Tristram Shandy.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 5:46 PM on April 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
The same for Bleak House, but only twice so far. That said, if you don't like Dickens, but want something with a really strong you-are-there-in-Victorian-London quality, I recommend Arthur Morrison's The Hole in the Wall. It's short and very gripping.
in a regular way. not like Tristram Shandy.
posted by doubtfulpalace at 5:46 PM on April 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
I saw this several days ago and my first thought was “It doesn’t need to be either/or.” But of course either/or gets the clicks.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:02 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by octobersurprise at 6:02 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I really hate the framing, for exactly the reason octobersurprise suggests. Don't skip the 21 books, read 42 books!
posted by pwinn at 6:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by pwinn at 6:19 PM on April 26, 2018 [9 favorites]
But of course either/or gets the clicks.
Fear and Trembling is also good
posted by thelonius at 6:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Fear and Trembling is also good
posted by thelonius at 6:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
This is maybe lame of me, but as I've grown older, I really am getting skeptical of any kind of objective quality measure of literature. Vonnegut does very little for me, but if you love it, great.
Read what you like, let other people read what they like!
posted by Chrysostom at 7:04 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Read what you like, let other people read what they like!
posted by Chrysostom at 7:04 PM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
Fear and Trembling is also good
Isn’t it just like GQ to recommend Concluding Unscientific Postscript instead.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Isn’t it just like GQ to recommend Concluding Unscientific Postscript instead.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:14 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I loved this. It really helps that it's all from different, credited writers, so it's not just one crank. (Though the one who referenced his own book: we see what you did there.)
Headline aside, it's not objective truth, it's a bunch of entertaining opinions and suggestions for books to try. This is good.
Also, if I'm gonna pick a Mark Twain book, it's Life on the Mississippi every time.
posted by asperity at 7:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
Headline aside, it's not objective truth, it's a bunch of entertaining opinions and suggestions for books to try. This is good.
Also, if I'm gonna pick a Mark Twain book, it's Life on the Mississippi every time.
posted by asperity at 7:27 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Innocents Abroad is fun, too, although it could be tightened up a bit.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:29 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by Chrysostom at 7:29 PM on April 26, 2018
In general I find that when I read Official Great Classics of Literature that are often popularly maligned as boring or too hard, I actually enjoy the shit out of them (hello, Moby Dick!), but I am always really interested in what people who in general enjoy Official Great Classics of Literature just absolutely loathe or find unreadable.
I couldn't do Catch-22. I didn't make it 50 pages. I have a lot of guilt about it, but it was not working for me (a lot of the problem was the structural jumping around -- I struggle with that as a reader). Maybe I'll try again in a few years, when my children are bigger and I can concentrate without interruption for longer periods of time.
Hated A Farewell to Arms, mostly for the misogyny.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:32 PM on April 26, 2018
I couldn't do Catch-22. I didn't make it 50 pages. I have a lot of guilt about it, but it was not working for me (a lot of the problem was the structural jumping around -- I struggle with that as a reader). Maybe I'll try again in a few years, when my children are bigger and I can concentrate without interruption for longer periods of time.
Hated A Farewell to Arms, mostly for the misogyny.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:32 PM on April 26, 2018
Of course this is clickbait, but the GQ intern who got the job turned in one of the great parodies of our time. The giveaway, of course, is including The Alchemist in a list of Great Books in the Western canon.
posted by oluckyman at 7:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by oluckyman at 7:36 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
God, the book they suggest instead of Dracula sounds like something I would nope right the hell away from so fast.
posted by sarcasticah at 7:40 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by sarcasticah at 7:40 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
> I guess you missed it when you read the article, but these are each by different authors. So it's actually two somebodies, and a third different person for The Bible.
I didn't, but either way I stand by my (apparently badly made) point: Telling other people what to read is an act of arrogance, and if you want to get away with that, you have to earn it.
If you reveal obvious bias in doing so (like including two Hemingways and two Salingers in a list of 21) you're obviously just talking about what you like and don't like, or at least you're applying some standard other than what you stated (whether you're a person or a group, but especially if you let one of the group get away with inserting their own work).
Most importantly: If you start by saying that you get to decide what it takes to be "well read," don't explicitly remove things like the bible from the list. Is the bible awesome writing? No. Is it the peak of narrative skill? No. Is it often incoherent and overrated? Duh. But man, whatever you think (and I'll probably agree), you're not well read if you haven't read the fucking bible. This is about impact and about cultural context, not about digging through the stack of semi-random books on your nightstand and deciding one of them is slightly better and just as pleasantly gory.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 7:59 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
I didn't, but either way I stand by my (apparently badly made) point: Telling other people what to read is an act of arrogance, and if you want to get away with that, you have to earn it.
If you reveal obvious bias in doing so (like including two Hemingways and two Salingers in a list of 21) you're obviously just talking about what you like and don't like, or at least you're applying some standard other than what you stated (whether you're a person or a group, but especially if you let one of the group get away with inserting their own work).
Most importantly: If you start by saying that you get to decide what it takes to be "well read," don't explicitly remove things like the bible from the list. Is the bible awesome writing? No. Is it the peak of narrative skill? No. Is it often incoherent and overrated? Duh. But man, whatever you think (and I'll probably agree), you're not well read if you haven't read the fucking bible. This is about impact and about cultural context, not about digging through the stack of semi-random books on your nightstand and deciding one of them is slightly better and just as pleasantly gory.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 7:59 PM on April 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
I understand the struggle with Tristram Shandy and I've been there. But a friend of mine did his PhD on it and he encouraged me to give it another go. He recommended the skimming the boring bits. And you know, I stuck with it and I was surprised how funny it is. But yeah not for everyone.
And yes I'll add my voice to those others above - I'd happily reread any and all of Ursula LeGuin's books and especially the Earthsea stories over ever reading any of Lord of Rings again. As for them being derivative of Tolkien... I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt that you read them along time ago and might be misremembering and/or you mixed them up with Shannara books.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:00 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
And yes I'll add my voice to those others above - I'd happily reread any and all of Ursula LeGuin's books and especially the Earthsea stories over ever reading any of Lord of Rings again. As for them being derivative of Tolkien... I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt that you read them along time ago and might be misremembering and/or you mixed them up with Shannara books.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:00 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
If you reveal obvious bias in doing so (like including two Hemingways and two Salingers in a list of 21) you're obviously just talking about what you like and don't like, or at least you're applying some standard other than what you stated (whether you're a person or a group, but especially if you let one of the group get away with inserting their own work).
I don't know anyone who graduated from an American public school without being assigned at least two Hemingway novels and Catcher in the Rye. Franny and Zooey was never forced on me, but I did have a lot of people tell me it was worth reading. (I despised Catcher, and avoided Salinger ever after.) If this list is meant to address books that a lot of people feel they ought to have read by age 22, then I give the seeming overrepresentation of Hemingway and Salinger a pass. I think it reflects the overrepresentation of Hemingway and Salinger on high school reading lists.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:27 PM on April 26, 2018
I don't know anyone who graduated from an American public school without being assigned at least two Hemingway novels and Catcher in the Rye. Franny and Zooey was never forced on me, but I did have a lot of people tell me it was worth reading. (I despised Catcher, and avoided Salinger ever after.) If this list is meant to address books that a lot of people feel they ought to have read by age 22, then I give the seeming overrepresentation of Hemingway and Salinger a pass. I think it reflects the overrepresentation of Hemingway and Salinger on high school reading lists.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:27 PM on April 26, 2018
The fact that Keith Richards’ book Life makes Mick Jagger into a sympathetic character is one of the great things about the book!
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 8:43 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 8:43 PM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
In general I find that when I read Official Great Classics of Literature that are often popularly maligned as boring or too hard, I actually enjoy the shit out of them (hello, Moby Dick!), but I am always really interested in what people who in general enjoy Official Great Classics of Literature just absolutely loathe or find unreadable.
Yes. And having ignored most of the little formal education I had, I got to do things like pick up "The Stranger" around age 40 having no idea what it was.
There's this book, oh, you've heard of it. OK.
It's interesting reading things like that without having any prejudice as to who likes a book like that and who doesn't, and no one nudging you towards what you're supposed to think about it.
This is about impact and about cultural context, not about digging through the stack of semi-random books on your nightstand and deciding one of them is slightly better and just as pleasantly gory.
That's the part that genuinely confuses me about this and other lists like it, isn't the point to have read the same books as other people, the same "classics" to have a point of reference? Otherwise you're just reading books you like, which is great, but not really the same thing.
You might as well say "Instead of The Bible you should read Batman: Year One."
I don't know anyone who graduated from an American public school without being assigned at least two Hemingway novels and Catcher in the Rye.
It's got to be more conditional than you think, I read way more than most people I went to school with and I didn't read any of those. I'm sure I had the option to read some Hemingway, but Catcher in the Rye never came up, I don't think I really knew what it was until I was an adult.
posted by bongo_x at 9:26 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Yes. And having ignored most of the little formal education I had, I got to do things like pick up "The Stranger" around age 40 having no idea what it was.
There's this book, oh, you've heard of it. OK.
It's interesting reading things like that without having any prejudice as to who likes a book like that and who doesn't, and no one nudging you towards what you're supposed to think about it.
This is about impact and about cultural context, not about digging through the stack of semi-random books on your nightstand and deciding one of them is slightly better and just as pleasantly gory.
That's the part that genuinely confuses me about this and other lists like it, isn't the point to have read the same books as other people, the same "classics" to have a point of reference? Otherwise you're just reading books you like, which is great, but not really the same thing.
You might as well say "Instead of The Bible you should read Batman: Year One."
I don't know anyone who graduated from an American public school without being assigned at least two Hemingway novels and Catcher in the Rye.
It's got to be more conditional than you think, I read way more than most people I went to school with and I didn't read any of those. I'm sure I had the option to read some Hemingway, but Catcher in the Rye never came up, I don't think I really knew what it was until I was an adult.
posted by bongo_x at 9:26 PM on April 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
The fact that Keith Richards comes off as the villain in "Life" is one of the amazing things about it.
posted by bongo_x at 9:27 PM on April 26, 2018
posted by bongo_x at 9:27 PM on April 26, 2018
The weird underlying premise of this article is that you have to consume a certain amount of high-end literature, and if you can't stomach those, then maybe you can handle these. It treats reading as both an obligation and a chore. I'd be fine with a List of Books That Have Something to Offer, Take 'Em or Leave 'Em. There are books on both lists that I know to have a lot of merit.
posted by Edgewise at 9:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Edgewise at 9:34 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I got to do things like pick up "The Stranger" around age 40 having no idea what it was.
There's this book, oh, you've heard of it. OK.
It's interesting reading things like that without having any prejudice as to who likes a book like that and who doesn't, and no one nudging you towards what you're supposed to think about it.
Sounds like the perfect way to read that particular book. Weirdly I prefer a lot of existentialists for their literature over their philosophical treatises. OK, I guess just Camus and Sartre.
posted by Edgewise at 9:39 PM on April 26, 2018
There's this book, oh, you've heard of it. OK.
It's interesting reading things like that without having any prejudice as to who likes a book like that and who doesn't, and no one nudging you towards what you're supposed to think about it.
Sounds like the perfect way to read that particular book. Weirdly I prefer a lot of existentialists for their literature over their philosophical treatises. OK, I guess just Camus and Sartre.
posted by Edgewise at 9:39 PM on April 26, 2018
> The fact that Keith Richards’ book Life makes Mick Jagger into a sympathetic character is one of the great things about the book!
> The fact that Keith Richards comes off as the villain in "Life" is one of the amazing things about it.
Charlie Watts was the true hero of the story. A percussionist and a gentleman.
posted by bunbury at 9:50 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
> The fact that Keith Richards comes off as the villain in "Life" is one of the amazing things about it.
Charlie Watts was the true hero of the story. A percussionist and a gentleman.
posted by bunbury at 9:50 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
This kind of thing is a fun conversation starter/rage inducer.
I feel vindicated for always having hated Catcher in the Rye. But I'm torn because I loved both The Old Man and the Sea AND Summer Book.
posted by latkes at 10:10 PM on April 26, 2018
I feel vindicated for always having hated Catcher in the Rye. But I'm torn because I loved both The Old Man and the Sea AND Summer Book.
posted by latkes at 10:10 PM on April 26, 2018
Figure I can read 20 books minimum per year, and at my age have about 20 years left to read them, all things being equal (like I retain my marbles and haven't gone blind), I can choose canonically or just try to keep up. Or maybe a little from column A and some from column B. But if I categorically exclude what have long been considered canonical books, I may be being overly prescriptive.
posted by lipservant at 10:23 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by lipservant at 10:23 PM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
I find it sort of bizarre to get "permission" to skip things like LoTR or Dracula, to name two I happen to like, from someone whose tastes are so middlebrow they put those things on a list of Great Books (their capitals) to begin with. It'd be like someone saying I shouldn't feel guilty for not knowing advanced math like trigonometry, a combination of obviously true, pretty condescending and unintentionally funny.
And yes, this is totally on the editors. I refuse to believe they actually asked the writers for Great Books to toss out of the canon and got something by Keith Richards. They pieced this into something the contributors should be slightly embarrassed by after the submissions. But it's generating discussion so we'll get even more listicles in the future I suppose.
posted by mark k at 11:12 PM on April 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
And yes, this is totally on the editors. I refuse to believe they actually asked the writers for Great Books to toss out of the canon and got something by Keith Richards. They pieced this into something the contributors should be slightly embarrassed by after the submissions. But it's generating discussion so we'll get even more listicles in the future I suppose.
posted by mark k at 11:12 PM on April 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
I don't know anyone who graduated from an American public school without being assigned at least two Hemingway novels and Catcher in the Rye.
Hello, I graduated from an American public school without being assigned Catcher in the Rye. Maaaybe we read The Old Man And The Sea? Anyway, now you can have at least one person in the other column
posted by Going To Maine at 12:33 AM on April 27, 2018
Hello, I graduated from an American public school without being assigned Catcher in the Rye. Maaaybe we read The Old Man And The Sea? Anyway, now you can have at least one person in the other column
posted by Going To Maine at 12:33 AM on April 27, 2018
(Sincerely! Not a bluh surely they knew somebody in that category! Because quite likely you didn’t. Anyway, I’m one.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 AM on April 27, 2018
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 AM on April 27, 2018
Silly to make this list and say “don’t read this” because the books listed have already been read, unless the audience they’re trying to catch is at a grade school (elementary school) level. Maybe that is indeed their audience. I was told by someone they didn’t think I read much. No, these days, I don’t read as much as I did in the past. I have a job, I run a business, I have a ten year old and I’m trying to worry less about all of the aging members of my family who have limited resources to make their lives comfortable. This list doesn’t make me re-read anything because I would rather read new stuff that I haven’t read so I read lists like this for humor.
posted by Yellow at 2:01 AM on April 27, 2018
posted by Yellow at 2:01 AM on April 27, 2018
I might have read this article, but the pull quote was such bullshit I read Twitter for twenty minutes instead. I'm sure a lot of good points were raised in this thread, but I similarly did not read it. Good luck replying to this comment
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:42 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 2:42 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Totally lost me with saying that Blood Meridian provided little pleasure. I've read it at least 5 times. I've recommended it to so many people: EVERY PERSON has loved it. It's so effing good.
posted by Dressed to Kill at 4:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Dressed to Kill at 4:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
kittens for breakfast: All you have to read is Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. After that, you no longer have to read, well, any book, really, for that is all books in one.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:37 AM on April 27, 2018
posted by Chitownfats at 4:37 AM on April 27, 2018
It seems so random to suggest replacing the Bible by The Notebook. You might as well say instead of reading the Quran read Itunes terms and conditions.
posted by SageLeVoid at 4:43 AM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
posted by SageLeVoid at 4:43 AM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
Totally lost me with saying that Blood Meridian provided little pleasure. I've read it at least 5 times. I've recommended it to so many people: EVERY PERSON has loved it. It's so effing good.
The freedom of listicle writers is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.
posted by thelonius at 5:15 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
The freedom of listicle writers is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.
posted by thelonius at 5:15 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Metafilter: Good luck replying to this comment
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:22 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Ashwagandha at 7:22 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
My opinions:
I still do not get why Catcher in the Rye is considered a great book. Maybe I read it too early (it was assigned in 8th grade English), but even at the time, I saw Holden as a vapid character who had created all of his own problems. His struggles simply made me angry. On the other hand, thinking about it now, maybe that was my first glimpse at what white/male/rich privilege is. However, there are plenty of other, better, books to introduce you to why so many white guys at the top of the world think of themselves as underdogs. Maybe it's that the book was published in 1951 and the notion of the disaffected teenager was shocking then, but that does not make the whining of a wannabe man-child any better. SE Hinton did disaffected teenagers much better and she was a teen when she wrote The Outsiders. It still fits the genre, but it's a much better book.
I have very mixed views on Hemingway. The man could write and write well. It may have been the teacher I had, but the amount that I got out of reading The Sun Also Rises is more than almost any other book I read in high school. On the other hand, A Farewell to Arms is still "that was another country, and besides, the wench is dead." I love Catch-22 and think it's a much better view of the absurdities and loss of war. I remember Yossarian tearing up the contact information for Luciana and the terror and loss he feels afterwards much more than what's his face losing his common-law wife in A Farewell to Arms. I never made it through The Old Man and the Sea and honestly, after struggling through The Island of the Day Before, which is Umberto Eco's "man stuck in a boat contemplating existence" novel, I don't need to read another one. The Eco book is excellent, but I consider it his most difficult book, up there with The Prague Cemetery.
Inherent Vice is fantastic. My standard advice is to start with The Crying of Lot 49 and move on from there, but Inherent Vice is an equally good jumping off point. I will read Gravity's Rainbow one of these days, once I make it past page 800 of Against the Day, which is fantastic, but just a bit too long.
The only thing worse the The Alchemist is Johnathan Livingston Seagull. The only reason to read The Alchemist is to fend off Johnathan Livingston Seagull. Anything else is better. They could have put any other book there, even 50 Shades of Gray and I still would have agreed with the recommendation.
posted by Hactar at 7:31 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I still do not get why Catcher in the Rye is considered a great book. Maybe I read it too early (it was assigned in 8th grade English), but even at the time, I saw Holden as a vapid character who had created all of his own problems. His struggles simply made me angry. On the other hand, thinking about it now, maybe that was my first glimpse at what white/male/rich privilege is. However, there are plenty of other, better, books to introduce you to why so many white guys at the top of the world think of themselves as underdogs. Maybe it's that the book was published in 1951 and the notion of the disaffected teenager was shocking then, but that does not make the whining of a wannabe man-child any better. SE Hinton did disaffected teenagers much better and she was a teen when she wrote The Outsiders. It still fits the genre, but it's a much better book.
I have very mixed views on Hemingway. The man could write and write well. It may have been the teacher I had, but the amount that I got out of reading The Sun Also Rises is more than almost any other book I read in high school. On the other hand, A Farewell to Arms is still "that was another country, and besides, the wench is dead." I love Catch-22 and think it's a much better view of the absurdities and loss of war. I remember Yossarian tearing up the contact information for Luciana and the terror and loss he feels afterwards much more than what's his face losing his common-law wife in A Farewell to Arms. I never made it through The Old Man and the Sea and honestly, after struggling through The Island of the Day Before, which is Umberto Eco's "man stuck in a boat contemplating existence" novel, I don't need to read another one. The Eco book is excellent, but I consider it his most difficult book, up there with The Prague Cemetery.
Inherent Vice is fantastic. My standard advice is to start with The Crying of Lot 49 and move on from there, but Inherent Vice is an equally good jumping off point. I will read Gravity's Rainbow one of these days, once I make it past page 800 of Against the Day, which is fantastic, but just a bit too long.
The only thing worse the The Alchemist is Johnathan Livingston Seagull. The only reason to read The Alchemist is to fend off Johnathan Livingston Seagull. Anything else is better. They could have put any other book there, even 50 Shades of Gray and I still would have agreed with the recommendation.
posted by Hactar at 7:31 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Looks like there are some interesting book recommendations. Now can someone do moby dick & the count of monte cristo?
Moby Dick >> In the Heart of the Sea (the true story that inspired Moby Dick)
Count of Monte Cristo >> The Stars My Destination (~1200 pgs vs 250)
posted by Bron at 7:41 AM on April 27, 2018
Moby Dick >> In the Heart of the Sea (the true story that inspired Moby Dick)
Count of Monte Cristo >> The Stars My Destination (~1200 pgs vs 250)
posted by Bron at 7:41 AM on April 27, 2018
I want to put in a vote for "Goodbye To All That". The writer has a point about Graves' racism in that one passage (as well as some equally dismissive remarks about people from Wales), but it provides a detailed description of the horrors of the First World War.
"The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" is gripping, but it's very very long - you might not have time to read the other 20 recommended books if you start that one. I've read most of that book over the years, but I don't know if I've ever finished it. (Shirer has a book about the fall of the French Republic that is equally good, by the way.)
I had never heard of "Destiny of the Republic" or "The Sisters Brothers", and they were both available from my library for electronic checkout, so I am grateful to this article for providing some new reading hints.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 7:45 AM on April 27, 2018
"The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich" is gripping, but it's very very long - you might not have time to read the other 20 recommended books if you start that one. I've read most of that book over the years, but I don't know if I've ever finished it. (Shirer has a book about the fall of the French Republic that is equally good, by the way.)
I had never heard of "Destiny of the Republic" or "The Sisters Brothers", and they were both available from my library for electronic checkout, so I am grateful to this article for providing some new reading hints.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 7:45 AM on April 27, 2018
It seems so random to suggest replacing the Bible by The Notebook
Makes sense to me. The Bible is long, frequently depressing, and then suddenly kills off everyone in the last chapter, while The Notebook will warm your heart and make you cry and there is sexy kissing in the rain. Would you rather think about Jesus or Ryan Gosling?
posted by betweenthebars at 7:55 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Makes sense to me. The Bible is long, frequently depressing, and then suddenly kills off everyone in the last chapter, while The Notebook will warm your heart and make you cry and there is sexy kissing in the rain. Would you rather think about Jesus or Ryan Gosling?
posted by betweenthebars at 7:55 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I will admit that I'm fascinated by the idea that you should read The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich instead of Henry James. Is this trolling? Is it some commentary on the politics implicit in James's admiration of the wealthy?
I hope it's not just "LOL James is soooooooo boring, why not read a manly book about Hitler instead".
You don't have to like Henry James - honestly, I was going to read The Golden Bowl and found myself so annoyed by the wealthy characters that I stopped midway - but man is it the mark of a philistine to do the usual "his prose is so haaaaaaaard and opaque and everything is subtext, that's why he is bad". No, you learn to live up to Henry James's prose, not seek to drag him down to your level.
If the mark of the terrible English classes of my youth was the idea that reading was worthy rather than fun, the mark of the present is the belief that if something is not easily, immediately, trivially fun (or easily, immediately, trivially full of contemporary platitudes - speaking of JLS, I feel like he made it from picture books into serious literature) then it's a bad book and not worth reading.
posted by Frowner at 8:00 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I hope it's not just "LOL James is soooooooo boring, why not read a manly book about Hitler instead".
You don't have to like Henry James - honestly, I was going to read The Golden Bowl and found myself so annoyed by the wealthy characters that I stopped midway - but man is it the mark of a philistine to do the usual "his prose is so haaaaaaaard and opaque and everything is subtext, that's why he is bad". No, you learn to live up to Henry James's prose, not seek to drag him down to your level.
If the mark of the terrible English classes of my youth was the idea that reading was worthy rather than fun, the mark of the present is the belief that if something is not easily, immediately, trivially fun (or easily, immediately, trivially full of contemporary platitudes - speaking of JLS, I feel like he made it from picture books into serious literature) then it's a bad book and not worth reading.
posted by Frowner at 8:00 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think it's always odd when people who are obviously well-read in terms of the traditional Western literary canon denigrate the same canon; while their criticism is certainly not without its merits, it's a bit like a comfortably well-off person talking about how money is just so overrated.
There is a benefit to having read and being conversant in canonical literature within a certain culture or cultural realm, and it goes beyond the merits of the individual books qua books. They provide a set of shared metaphorical tools, a common basis for discussion of other things, through high-level metaphors. Some knowledge of them is often assumed in serious discussion of other works, and even in more modern works themselves.
But even if you're not going to engage in academic discussion, there may still be merit in at least being conversant with books that may not necessarily be good; at some point it is useful for other purposes, to basically settle on a bunch of books which provide a variety of metaphors for complex concepts, a sort of high-level linguistic abstraction.
They cut right to what's probably the best example with #12 on the list, the Bible: as a book, no argument it kinda sucks. It's basically a poorly-edited anthology, the writing style is all over the place, the most popular translations are seriously flawed, the narrative is at times incoherent, the whole thing is just a slog to read, at least in my opinion. But having at least some understanding of what's in it is pretty darn helpful if you want to read, oh I dunno, just to pick something modern: basically anything by Miguel Ángel Asturias—whose work is legitimately meritorious (I mean, he has a Nobel prize, among other things), and sorta littered with Biblical allusion. His work assumes, IMO, a basic Sunday School familiarity with the (in his case the no-shit big-C, Catholic) Canon in order to appreciate some of the inversions, as does a lot of Latin American literature.
So I guess it depends what purpose you're reading for. If you're just looking for a novel to read, I'm not going to argue that In the Heart of the Sea is more readable than Moby Dick (though I notice that's not on their books-to-not-read list), but if you haven't read or at least have a pretty good understanding of Moby Dick, you're going to miss a lot of "great white whale" allusions, including in books that may be more interesting reading.
Read or don't read what you want to, of course, but I wouldn't tell someone to not read canonical books just because they're a hard read or somewhat boring by modern standards; someone who is willing to work through them may find their appreciation of other books, and ability to discuss them via shared abstractions with other people, enhanced by it. And for everyone else, there's Wikipedia, I guess.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
There is a benefit to having read and being conversant in canonical literature within a certain culture or cultural realm, and it goes beyond the merits of the individual books qua books. They provide a set of shared metaphorical tools, a common basis for discussion of other things, through high-level metaphors. Some knowledge of them is often assumed in serious discussion of other works, and even in more modern works themselves.
But even if you're not going to engage in academic discussion, there may still be merit in at least being conversant with books that may not necessarily be good; at some point it is useful for other purposes, to basically settle on a bunch of books which provide a variety of metaphors for complex concepts, a sort of high-level linguistic abstraction.
They cut right to what's probably the best example with #12 on the list, the Bible: as a book, no argument it kinda sucks. It's basically a poorly-edited anthology, the writing style is all over the place, the most popular translations are seriously flawed, the narrative is at times incoherent, the whole thing is just a slog to read, at least in my opinion. But having at least some understanding of what's in it is pretty darn helpful if you want to read, oh I dunno, just to pick something modern: basically anything by Miguel Ángel Asturias—whose work is legitimately meritorious (I mean, he has a Nobel prize, among other things), and sorta littered with Biblical allusion. His work assumes, IMO, a basic Sunday School familiarity with the (in his case the no-shit big-C, Catholic) Canon in order to appreciate some of the inversions, as does a lot of Latin American literature.
So I guess it depends what purpose you're reading for. If you're just looking for a novel to read, I'm not going to argue that In the Heart of the Sea is more readable than Moby Dick (though I notice that's not on their books-to-not-read list), but if you haven't read or at least have a pretty good understanding of Moby Dick, you're going to miss a lot of "great white whale" allusions, including in books that may be more interesting reading.
Read or don't read what you want to, of course, but I wouldn't tell someone to not read canonical books just because they're a hard read or somewhat boring by modern standards; someone who is willing to work through them may find their appreciation of other books, and ability to discuss them via shared abstractions with other people, enhanced by it. And for everyone else, there's Wikipedia, I guess.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [7 favorites]
From the way the suggestions read, it seems to me that the actual prompt must have been something more like "What's a book you think is overrated, and why? What book would you suggest instead?"
Which is a pretty good conversational topic if you sidestep any judgmental implications (and those are pretty much all in the headline and intro paragraph, easily ignored.)
posted by asperity at 8:18 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Which is a pretty good conversational topic if you sidestep any judgmental implications (and those are pretty much all in the headline and intro paragraph, easily ignored.)
posted by asperity at 8:18 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Looks like there are some interesting book recommendations. Now can someone do moby dick & the count of monte cristo?
Moby Dick > Moby. Count Of Monte Cristo < A Monte Cristo.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:36 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Moby Dick > Moby. Count Of Monte Cristo < A Monte Cristo.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:36 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
If you read the Bible and it was boring, you were taught it wrong. Which, chances are EXCELLENT you were taught it wrong, because it's generally taught very very badly, and because people get up and read it in a sing-songy preacher moan that strips all the meaning from the words, and they make it very didactic, and often ignore what the text actually says because "everyone knows what it means," but if you slow down and actually read it, that is some crazy-ass shit, yo. Whatever else the Bible is, it is never boring.
I had an Old Testament professor who used to teach year-round Bible read-through Bible studies at local churches, and she always started with Numbers, specifically because everyone thought it was the most boring book, and by the third week everyone would be like, "DUDE YOU HAVE TO COME TO THIS BIBLE STUDY AND HEAR THE CRAZY-ASS SHIT THIS LADY IS SAYING ABOUT NUMBERS!" and her class would be quadrupling in size.
I sometimes do the Scripture readings at Mass, and people always, always come up to me afterwards and say, "Whoa, I had no idea that story was in the Bible, that was insane! I have never heard that before!" And I'm like, Actually, you've been hearing it every single year on the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time for 40 years, you just tune it out because before now you never heard anybody read it like the words actually mean things.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:56 AM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
I had an Old Testament professor who used to teach year-round Bible read-through Bible studies at local churches, and she always started with Numbers, specifically because everyone thought it was the most boring book, and by the third week everyone would be like, "DUDE YOU HAVE TO COME TO THIS BIBLE STUDY AND HEAR THE CRAZY-ASS SHIT THIS LADY IS SAYING ABOUT NUMBERS!" and her class would be quadrupling in size.
I sometimes do the Scripture readings at Mass, and people always, always come up to me afterwards and say, "Whoa, I had no idea that story was in the Bible, that was insane! I have never heard that before!" And I'm like, Actually, you've been hearing it every single year on the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time for 40 years, you just tune it out because before now you never heard anybody read it like the words actually mean things.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:56 AM on April 27, 2018 [16 favorites]
It must be some kind of internet opinionator rite of passage to publicly make the leap from "Holden isn't a nice kid" (or, better still, "Holden isn't as enlightened as I am") to "Catcher in the Rye is a terrible book" but golly it gets tedious watching it happen. Anyway, as pointless as these lists are, this one at least missed the funniest tic of "[number] Books You Must Read Before You Die" that always makes me ask "and if I don't? Am I not allowed to die?"
posted by Smearcase at 9:12 AM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by Smearcase at 9:12 AM on April 27, 2018 [5 favorites]
Instead: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Fredrick Douglass
If you read nothing else on this list, this is a good one. There's also an In Our Time or some other BBC podcast about it that you can listen to. It's so good -- it was the only book from my undergraduate that I liked.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 9:23 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
If you read nothing else on this list, this is a good one. There's also an In Our Time or some other BBC podcast about it that you can listen to. It's so good -- it was the only book from my undergraduate that I liked.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 9:23 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Bron: "Count of Monte Cristo >> The Stars My Destination (~1200 pgs vs 250)"
Both of them are really good, though.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:30 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Both of them are really good, though.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:30 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
Which, chances are EXCELLENT you were taught it wrong
I'd agree with that. Say what you will about Christianity and the Bible & it's Apocrypha (all of us raised in it are gonna have a variety of issues) but it is a big part of Western literature. A young man who worked for me for a bit told me how much he struggled through his English Masters because he was raised an Atheist. He had no idea about Biblical allusions and references, it was a foreign language to him. He read a bit of the Bible but he mostly just read commentators of the Bible and did his best to bluff his way through.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:33 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I'd agree with that. Say what you will about Christianity and the Bible & it's Apocrypha (all of us raised in it are gonna have a variety of issues) but it is a big part of Western literature. A young man who worked for me for a bit told me how much he struggled through his English Masters because he was raised an Atheist. He had no idea about Biblical allusions and references, it was a foreign language to him. He read a bit of the Bible but he mostly just read commentators of the Bible and did his best to bluff his way through.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:33 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Whatever else the Bible is, it is never boring.
I read all of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, before taking a mental health break when I got to the New Testament and discovered it was at least as depressing as the rest of it (which has turned into a many-years-long break at this point, but I'll get back to it eventually). It is definitely not true that the Bible is never boring. The multi-page genealogies may be important for understanding the function of the Bible as a religious and political text, but gripping reading they are not.
posted by biogeo at 9:36 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I read all of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha, before taking a mental health break when I got to the New Testament and discovered it was at least as depressing as the rest of it (which has turned into a many-years-long break at this point, but I'll get back to it eventually). It is definitely not true that the Bible is never boring. The multi-page genealogies may be important for understanding the function of the Bible as a religious and political text, but gripping reading they are not.
posted by biogeo at 9:36 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Both of them are really good, though
Not if you care about how women are written, they aren’t
posted by schadenfrau at 9:37 AM on April 27, 2018
Not if you care about how women are written, they aren’t
posted by schadenfrau at 9:37 AM on April 27, 2018
Hm, replace my "It is definitely not true" with "I disagree." That was fightier than I meant and also obviously an opinion, not a statement of fact.
posted by biogeo at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2018
posted by biogeo at 9:38 AM on April 27, 2018
My take is that I have different standards on women characters for books written in 1844 or even 1956 than I do for a book written today. If you feel differently, I respect that.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:48 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by Chrysostom at 9:48 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Bron: "Count of Monte Cristo >> The Stars My Destination (~1200 pgs vs 250)"
Both of them are really good, though.
English translation might matter too on the Count: I read and loved the Robin Buss one and I've heard it's the only one that is unexpurgated and treats the book as the fun potboiler it is.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:01 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Both of them are really good, though.
English translation might matter too on the Count: I read and loved the Robin Buss one and I've heard it's the only one that is unexpurgated and treats the book as the fun potboiler it is.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:01 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
In terms of The Stars My Destination and "classics" of science fiction generally: They're not great entry points to science fiction for people who are just curious about the genre or are seeking some light reading.
First off, even a lot of science fiction that was progressive and left-leaning about race, gender, sexuality, etc when it was written isn't going to come off that way today. So if you're reading it with no strong interest in science fiction and no context for the story, it's going to be nothing but frustrating and offensive, with no "interesting to consider that this was a very queer-friendly story in 1960" or whatever.
Second, stories become more interesting when you're reading them with context/for context, and this helps you deal with frustration. I find The Stars My Destination, for instance, intensely frustrating on a lot of levels, but I'm also motivated to read it because it's proto-New Wave, I have a historical interest in New Wave SF and I tend to like the New Wave "voice" in science fiction.
If someone said to me, "I haven't read much science fiction, what are some books you would recommend that are good starting points that many people would enjoy on the story level?" I would not start with Alfred Bester. I mean, I'd probably ask them what other kinds of fiction they enjoyed - I wouldn't recommend Binti to someone who doesn't do YA, I wouldn't recommend The Fifth Season to someone who wanted a distracting, light story or who hated trilogies, etc. If someone said, "I love experimental prose and complex structures like what you find in the more experimental of modern novelists", I'd suggest Dhalgren.
But in general, I'd start with novels whose takes on gender, sexuality, race and other identities were within shouting distance of progressive-mainstream attitudes of today, and I would definitely avoid books that were well-known for significantly problematic attitudes. It's not like The Stars My Destination or The Female Man are going anywhere - if someone gets really into science fiction as a genre, they can read those books when they have enough invested in Reading Science Fiction To Study Science Fiction to find the reading engaging.
posted by Frowner at 10:14 AM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
First off, even a lot of science fiction that was progressive and left-leaning about race, gender, sexuality, etc when it was written isn't going to come off that way today. So if you're reading it with no strong interest in science fiction and no context for the story, it's going to be nothing but frustrating and offensive, with no "interesting to consider that this was a very queer-friendly story in 1960" or whatever.
Second, stories become more interesting when you're reading them with context/for context, and this helps you deal with frustration. I find The Stars My Destination, for instance, intensely frustrating on a lot of levels, but I'm also motivated to read it because it's proto-New Wave, I have a historical interest in New Wave SF and I tend to like the New Wave "voice" in science fiction.
If someone said to me, "I haven't read much science fiction, what are some books you would recommend that are good starting points that many people would enjoy on the story level?" I would not start with Alfred Bester. I mean, I'd probably ask them what other kinds of fiction they enjoyed - I wouldn't recommend Binti to someone who doesn't do YA, I wouldn't recommend The Fifth Season to someone who wanted a distracting, light story or who hated trilogies, etc. If someone said, "I love experimental prose and complex structures like what you find in the more experimental of modern novelists", I'd suggest Dhalgren.
But in general, I'd start with novels whose takes on gender, sexuality, race and other identities were within shouting distance of progressive-mainstream attitudes of today, and I would definitely avoid books that were well-known for significantly problematic attitudes. It's not like The Stars My Destination or The Female Man are going anywhere - if someone gets really into science fiction as a genre, they can read those books when they have enough invested in Reading Science Fiction To Study Science Fiction to find the reading engaging.
posted by Frowner at 10:14 AM on April 27, 2018 [8 favorites]
Like, I have been reading science fiction literally since I was ten or eleven - for more than thirty years now! - and I did not find Alfred Bester of any interest at all until a couple of years ago. It wasn't until I constructed a narrative for myself about how New Wave, experimental writing, left-wing politics and the feminist science fiction of the seventies all fit together that I became curious. As soon as I could pick my own science fiction from a wide range (my early teens) I read almost exclusively science fiction with queer and/or female and/or POC characters and didn't really look at anything else until I'd read a LOT of that kind.
"What You Should Read" is an ecosystem, not a list. You should read books that you can relate together so that they're greater than the sum of their parts, and you should read books that shed light on each other and challenge each other's conclusions. You should read books that you can think with.
posted by Frowner at 10:25 AM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
"What You Should Read" is an ecosystem, not a list. You should read books that you can relate together so that they're greater than the sum of their parts, and you should read books that shed light on each other and challenge each other's conclusions. You should read books that you can think with.
posted by Frowner at 10:25 AM on April 27, 2018 [6 favorites]
"What You Should Read" is an ecosystem, not a list. You should read books that you can relate together so that they're greater than the sum of their parts, and you should read books that shed light on each other and challenge each other's conclusions. You should read books that you can think with.
I think that advice, which I think is pretty good way of looking at it, is very applicable for approaching most artistic mediums. Understanding the context of a work can be really key to getting to understand something. I've made similar arguments to people who find say something like the work of Tarkovsky is impenetrable and boring. And yes, if you have lived on steady diet of James Cameron you're likely not going to connect much with Stalker. But if you take the time to understand a bit about where Tarkovsky is coming from or maybe watch something other than action films you might come to a better understanding. You still might not like it but you've done some work.
Also, especially in regards to lists of "canon", sometimes how it is introduced to us can be flawed. Poor teaching environments, that one jerk who claimed to live their life by a book or a movie, or negative reviews from peers or the media can all dissuade from approaching something with an open mind.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:01 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think that advice, which I think is pretty good way of looking at it, is very applicable for approaching most artistic mediums. Understanding the context of a work can be really key to getting to understand something. I've made similar arguments to people who find say something like the work of Tarkovsky is impenetrable and boring. And yes, if you have lived on steady diet of James Cameron you're likely not going to connect much with Stalker. But if you take the time to understand a bit about where Tarkovsky is coming from or maybe watch something other than action films you might come to a better understanding. You still might not like it but you've done some work.
Also, especially in regards to lists of "canon", sometimes how it is introduced to us can be flawed. Poor teaching environments, that one jerk who claimed to live their life by a book or a movie, or negative reviews from peers or the media can all dissuade from approaching something with an open mind.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:01 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Bible is never boring if you pick the good stories out and ignore both the genealogies and (especially) the stultifyingly repetitive descriptions of events wherin a thing is described, then described again, then a third time, then when you think you’re safe you notice it’s going to be described slightly differently for each of the 12 tribes, and then in the next book there will be an entire recapitulation of the last few hundred years just in case you nodded off during the previous book.
For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:13 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
the repeated parts can be really interesting from a who-wrote-which-parts-of-the-Bible perspective, and there can be lots of neat stuff to unpack from the genealogies too! and of course it's totally okay to find that boring! do not read the Bible if you don't want to! but lordy let's not pretend there a The Bible Is Objectively Boring argument to win here
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:20 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:20 AM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
let's not pretend there a The Bible Is Objectively Boring argument to win here
Nor an Objectively Fascinating one either, one presumes? ;)
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:23 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Nor an Objectively Fascinating one either, one presumes? ;)
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:23 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
I mean, arbitrary rules? despite the complicating factors of later changes and edits this is a record of a bronze age culture writing down the shit that mattered to them, there's nothing arbitrary about it
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:24 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by prize bull octorok at 11:24 AM on April 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
I was talking to a Millienial about why I felt it was important Nazis have free speech. I referenced 1984, but her school does not read that book because it's misogynist. They read the contemporary classic Ready Player One instead. That pretty much ended the conversation.
posted by xammerboy at 11:34 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by xammerboy at 11:34 AM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
We talked about this in another thread recently, I think, but this is why I think it's worthwhile reading the Bible with some outside scholarly support. Having more background on who these cats are and why they think stuff like mixing types of cloth is important can be very helpful. The Bible obviously takes it for granted that you are already familiar with the culture.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:35 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Chrysostom at 11:35 AM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
They read the contemporary classic Ready Player One instead.
I mean, that makes sense. Once is a dystopia set in the '80s, and the other is a dystopia obsessed with the '80s, that's basically the same, right?
posted by biogeo at 11:50 AM on April 27, 2018
I mean, that makes sense. Once is a dystopia set in the '80s, and the other is a dystopia obsessed with the '80s, that's basically the same, right?
posted by biogeo at 11:50 AM on April 27, 2018
is never boring if you pick the good stories out and ignore both the genealogies and (especially) the stultifyingly repetitive descriptions of events wherin a thing is described, then described again, then a third time, then when you think you’re safe you notice it’s going to be described slightly differently for each of the 12 tribes, and then in the next book there will be an entire recapitulation of the last few hundred years just in case you nodded off during the previous book.
For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships.
Yeah, but there were some some really interesting things about House of Leaves too, that's what made it so frustrating.
posted by bongo_x at 12:20 PM on April 27, 2018
For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships.
Yeah, but there were some some really interesting things about House of Leaves too, that's what made it so frustrating.
posted by bongo_x at 12:20 PM on April 27, 2018
I don't really understand taking offense at political views in older material. It seems like there's a weird view these days, I can't really put into words, but history is no more. It's all current and should be judged as such. We're losing perspective. How do you know where you are and where you're going if you don't know where you came from?
posted by bongo_x at 12:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by bongo_x at 12:27 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
I was talking to a Millienial about why I felt it was important Nazis have free speech. I referenced 1984, but her school does not read that book because it's misogynist. They read the contemporary classic Ready Player One instead. That pretty much ended the conversation.
That is fairly horrifying, though she's presumably not a Millennial unless we're going with the ever-expanding Millennial=young people definition.
posted by asperity at 12:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
That is fairly horrifying, though she's presumably not a Millennial unless we're going with the ever-expanding Millennial=young people definition.
posted by asperity at 12:40 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I don't think "taking offense" is the issue.
(Although I should say that replacing 1984 with Ready Player One is utterly point-missing, since it too is pretty sexist. I suspect that the real issue was "let's be contemporary, kids reading a contemporary book are at least reading", which is a little more defensible even if it makes class dull for kids who actually like to read.)
In junior high and high school classrooms, you can read only a handful of books a year. You're already winnowing out absurd numbers of important books and choosing a very disconnected approach where you go from, like, The Red Badge of Courage to Romeo and Juliet (as we did in my honors high school freshman English class). There is no way you can do a truly meaningful survey of important novels.
And very often you're dealing with kids who don't read fluently or just don't like reading very much. Even if you have kids who like reading, you're dealing with what are almost certainly very disparate preferences. So why have them read books that are going to be repulsive for their racism, misogyny, etc? You already can't provide a Compleat Literary Education, so what you're aiming for is educating kids to read and enjoy reading, and making kids of color sit through racist books or making girls sit through overtly sexist ones doesn't do any good for that. Many English teachers in fact argue that getting kids up to reading fluency is the most important, so it's better to have kids reading whatever they'll really read than to have them fake-reading or semi-reading, eg, Madame Bovary.
The bar for actively choosing a racist book or a misogynist book is pretty high - the book has to be so important that it's worth excluding other good but non-sexist and non-racist books. And you have to be ready to teach that book - you have to be ready to get your class through some very difficult discussions that can get pretty ugly, especially for the marginalized kids.
~~~
In terms of book recommendations, I have fumbled through far too many, "Oh, you should totally read The Female Man, it's witty and angry and feminist and, uh, you just have to brace yourself for the extended sequence that's really kind of transphobic, it's really good except for that part" conversations. I don't recommend books if I have to issue significant warnings about their politics. It's not that I'm mad that Joanna Russ wrote some less-than-optimal stuff - later on she talked about how she came to write it and why it was a mistake, and I feel like it was ignorance rather than bigotry. I'm not offended, it's just that there are a lot of witty, feminist novels that aren't transphobic.
If someone specifically says to me, "Frowner, I am super interested in the feminist science fiction of the seventies, what do you recommend that I read in this sub-genre", I'm going to say, "you should definitely read Joanna Russ because she was so influential", just like if someone is reading British dystopias they should read 1984.
But that's different from saying, "Of all the books in the world, you should totally read the ones that emphasize that you, as a woman/POC/queer person/trans person, are garbage, gross and stupid".
It's not about taking offense, it's about how we prioritize.
posted by Frowner at 12:54 PM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
(Although I should say that replacing 1984 with Ready Player One is utterly point-missing, since it too is pretty sexist. I suspect that the real issue was "let's be contemporary, kids reading a contemporary book are at least reading", which is a little more defensible even if it makes class dull for kids who actually like to read.)
In junior high and high school classrooms, you can read only a handful of books a year. You're already winnowing out absurd numbers of important books and choosing a very disconnected approach where you go from, like, The Red Badge of Courage to Romeo and Juliet (as we did in my honors high school freshman English class). There is no way you can do a truly meaningful survey of important novels.
And very often you're dealing with kids who don't read fluently or just don't like reading very much. Even if you have kids who like reading, you're dealing with what are almost certainly very disparate preferences. So why have them read books that are going to be repulsive for their racism, misogyny, etc? You already can't provide a Compleat Literary Education, so what you're aiming for is educating kids to read and enjoy reading, and making kids of color sit through racist books or making girls sit through overtly sexist ones doesn't do any good for that. Many English teachers in fact argue that getting kids up to reading fluency is the most important, so it's better to have kids reading whatever they'll really read than to have them fake-reading or semi-reading, eg, Madame Bovary.
The bar for actively choosing a racist book or a misogynist book is pretty high - the book has to be so important that it's worth excluding other good but non-sexist and non-racist books. And you have to be ready to teach that book - you have to be ready to get your class through some very difficult discussions that can get pretty ugly, especially for the marginalized kids.
~~~
In terms of book recommendations, I have fumbled through far too many, "Oh, you should totally read The Female Man, it's witty and angry and feminist and, uh, you just have to brace yourself for the extended sequence that's really kind of transphobic, it's really good except for that part" conversations. I don't recommend books if I have to issue significant warnings about their politics. It's not that I'm mad that Joanna Russ wrote some less-than-optimal stuff - later on she talked about how she came to write it and why it was a mistake, and I feel like it was ignorance rather than bigotry. I'm not offended, it's just that there are a lot of witty, feminist novels that aren't transphobic.
If someone specifically says to me, "Frowner, I am super interested in the feminist science fiction of the seventies, what do you recommend that I read in this sub-genre", I'm going to say, "you should definitely read Joanna Russ because she was so influential", just like if someone is reading British dystopias they should read 1984.
But that's different from saying, "Of all the books in the world, you should totally read the ones that emphasize that you, as a woman/POC/queer person/trans person, are garbage, gross and stupid".
It's not about taking offense, it's about how we prioritize.
posted by Frowner at 12:54 PM on April 27, 2018 [9 favorites]
Also, TBH 1984 isn't that overwhelmingly great a book or a particularly complex handling of its themes. Orwell was a very interesting person* but as a novelist, IMO, he is not much of a prose-writer or a characterizer. There are a lot of novels which deal with similar themes; 1984 and Animal Farm are big in America because no one knows that Orwell was a socialist and you can read them as anti-communist.
*who attempted to get MI5 to raciallly/commie-profile Paul Robeson and a number of other Jewish and POC activists and who did something, probably a pretty determined rape attempt, to his childhood best friend such that she refused to see him when he asked from his deathbed. I've read a lot of Orwell and admire many of his essays, but he did some things that were not just "oh, he was a man of his time" but were actively, aggressively racist and violent. I loved Orwell's essays and even now think of them with fondness, but I can't feel the same about him knowing he tried to get MI5 to spy on people because they were, eg, Jewish or Black, and knowing that he tried to rape the girl he grew up with. I can't unknow those things.
posted by Frowner at 1:08 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
*who attempted to get MI5 to raciallly/commie-profile Paul Robeson and a number of other Jewish and POC activists and who did something, probably a pretty determined rape attempt, to his childhood best friend such that she refused to see him when he asked from his deathbed. I've read a lot of Orwell and admire many of his essays, but he did some things that were not just "oh, he was a man of his time" but were actively, aggressively racist and violent. I loved Orwell's essays and even now think of them with fondness, but I can't feel the same about him knowing he tried to get MI5 to spy on people because they were, eg, Jewish or Black, and knowing that he tried to rape the girl he grew up with. I can't unknow those things.
posted by Frowner at 1:08 PM on April 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
TBH the part I find horrifying isn't so much about the actual merits of either 1984 or Ready Player One, it's that it's probably more useful that students learn to identify references like doublethink or Big Brother than secondhand snippets of 80s pop culture.
posted by asperity at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by asperity at 1:22 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
and I did not find Alfred Bester of any interest at all until a couple of years ago
Wow, I have almost the opposite reaction... Bester is one of the very few classic US sf writers I can read without cringing. A lot of the other dudes could tell great stories, but man were they ever a hotbed of libertarian nastiness.
Plus, The Demolished Man is one of the few sf futures that actually seems like a possible, believable future. It's complex and corrupt and yet also has social advances on the '50s.(The Stars My Destination is a harder sell, with its antihero and a far nastier society.)
Going back to the OP— FWIW, some of the "old" choices were much edgier in their time. Catch-22 was irreverent and liberating for 1961. I kind of suspect Catcher in the Rye was inflicted on many high school students because their teachers found it deliciously relevant when they read it. Of course, one generation's edgy is another's stodgy.
Also: instead of the Bible, you should read the Ramayana, not least because it's equally door-opening, for Indian and SE Asian culture.
posted by zompist at 2:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Wow, I have almost the opposite reaction... Bester is one of the very few classic US sf writers I can read without cringing. A lot of the other dudes could tell great stories, but man were they ever a hotbed of libertarian nastiness.
Plus, The Demolished Man is one of the few sf futures that actually seems like a possible, believable future. It's complex and corrupt and yet also has social advances on the '50s.(The Stars My Destination is a harder sell, with its antihero and a far nastier society.)
Going back to the OP— FWIW, some of the "old" choices were much edgier in their time. Catch-22 was irreverent and liberating for 1961. I kind of suspect Catcher in the Rye was inflicted on many high school students because their teachers found it deliciously relevant when they read it. Of course, one generation's edgy is another's stodgy.
Also: instead of the Bible, you should read the Ramayana, not least because it's equally door-opening, for Indian and SE Asian culture.
posted by zompist at 2:36 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Interesting to see what people read in school, because the only things I really remember were "1984" "Lord of the Flies" and the S.E. Hinton books. Probably explains a lot.
posted by bongo_x at 2:45 PM on April 27, 2018
posted by bongo_x at 2:45 PM on April 27, 2018
My brain often slips a gear when I conflate the titles The Stars my Destination and Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand. I like Bester but I prefer his short stories to his novels. I feel that Stars in my Pocket... Is Delaney's masterpiece, and highly recommended, especially if you like something interesting but found Dhalgren a bit too challenging, which is understandable.
Re: the article, I kinda shrug, both the originals and recommended replacements are worth a look, if you're curious about it.
posted by ovvl at 4:01 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Re: the article, I kinda shrug, both the originals and recommended replacements are worth a look, if you're curious about it.
posted by ovvl at 4:01 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
(Content Warning: Biblical rapey bits)
"For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships."
The arbitrary rules are one of the most fascinating bits! In Numbers, where YHWH is giving shit-tons of arbitrary rules, if you take a sec and read it, it's basically YHWH (who "tents" among the Israelites) being like, "Yo, so, I've never lived among humans before and I'm not totally sure how this is going to go, so you all need to approach my dwelling in these HYPER SPECIFIC WAYS or I'm going to accidentally lash out with my cosmic powers and kill you all." This is a fascinating thing! Israel is learning to be a holy people, but YHWH is also having to sort out how to be a God to a specific people, instead of living up on a mountain causing thunderstorms! Hosting the Lord of All Creation in your camp is no task for the non-detail-oriented*! (I contend the book both begins and ends "in the wilderness" because everybody's trying to sort their shit out -- it's just the Israelites and God, wandering around a desert, trying to figure out how the fuck this relationship is going to work.)
*He's not a tame lion!
With the "abusive relationships," I always like to go to Judges -- chock full o' utterly terrible human relationship issues, that devoted Christians often gloss over with lessons you're "supposed" to draw from them, but the naive reader is at an advantage here. If you read Judges and go, "OMG, this is seriously fucking messed up," congratulations! you have correctly divined the rhetorical goal of the Book of Judges, in contrast to your Sunday School friends who are like, "Yep, letting a woman get raped to death and then cutting her into 12 pieces and mailing her to your buddies is totes normal." What you're MEANT to take from that is OH MY FUCKING GOD, WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK? because the editors (the Deuteronomistic blokes) are leading up to a massive change where Israel has a human king, instead of God being the king, so they need to have some stuff between where God dwells among the tribes as the only king and shit's hunky-dory, and where they crown their own human king, and that shit is the Book of Judges, where we learn all about how left to their own devices, the Israelites are SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP. It's not an accident it ends on an absolutely horrifying story where even the "winners" are TERRIBLE PEOPLE, and then says (as its last line) "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Don't skip over that in a preacher moan! That's the whole point of the whole book! It should be a chilling final statement! You, naive reader, are correct in going, "HOLY CRAP WTF." Any Christian apologists who are like "God had very good reasons, probably relating to sex being evil, for all this being a cool thing to do" are WRONG WRONG WRONG and you are correctly recognizing this as one of the most fucked-up passages in literature, which is meant to be SO SUPER FUCKED UP that you will accept as inevitable and even good the forthcoming search for a human king, a total sea-change in how Israel views its relationship with God that required a shit-ton of propaganda to support it.
Now sometimes it's helpful to have historical knowledge (the Parable of the Talents takes on a really different complexion when you know Ancient Near Eastern economic theories), but with the human relationship stuff, leaving aside a normal amount of historical patriarchy, anything that seems fucked up? Probably IS fucked up, and you are reading it correctly, and it's fucked up for a rhetorical reason that you have a better chance of identifying than someone who's ideologically committed to the Bible having no fucked-up bits. It's fucked-up for a reason! You're reading it right! That's meant to come through! Your Christian friends who think that's not fucked up are disturbed and disturbing individuals!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:17 PM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
"For every Daniel in the lions den or love poem, there’s paragraphs of arbitrary rules and abusive relationships."
The arbitrary rules are one of the most fascinating bits! In Numbers, where YHWH is giving shit-tons of arbitrary rules, if you take a sec and read it, it's basically YHWH (who "tents" among the Israelites) being like, "Yo, so, I've never lived among humans before and I'm not totally sure how this is going to go, so you all need to approach my dwelling in these HYPER SPECIFIC WAYS or I'm going to accidentally lash out with my cosmic powers and kill you all." This is a fascinating thing! Israel is learning to be a holy people, but YHWH is also having to sort out how to be a God to a specific people, instead of living up on a mountain causing thunderstorms! Hosting the Lord of All Creation in your camp is no task for the non-detail-oriented*! (I contend the book both begins and ends "in the wilderness" because everybody's trying to sort their shit out -- it's just the Israelites and God, wandering around a desert, trying to figure out how the fuck this relationship is going to work.)
*He's not a tame lion!
With the "abusive relationships," I always like to go to Judges -- chock full o' utterly terrible human relationship issues, that devoted Christians often gloss over with lessons you're "supposed" to draw from them, but the naive reader is at an advantage here. If you read Judges and go, "OMG, this is seriously fucking messed up," congratulations! you have correctly divined the rhetorical goal of the Book of Judges, in contrast to your Sunday School friends who are like, "Yep, letting a woman get raped to death and then cutting her into 12 pieces and mailing her to your buddies is totes normal." What you're MEANT to take from that is OH MY FUCKING GOD, WHAT THE EVERLIVING FUCK? because the editors (the Deuteronomistic blokes) are leading up to a massive change where Israel has a human king, instead of God being the king, so they need to have some stuff between where God dwells among the tribes as the only king and shit's hunky-dory, and where they crown their own human king, and that shit is the Book of Judges, where we learn all about how left to their own devices, the Israelites are SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP. It's not an accident it ends on an absolutely horrifying story where even the "winners" are TERRIBLE PEOPLE, and then says (as its last line) "In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Don't skip over that in a preacher moan! That's the whole point of the whole book! It should be a chilling final statement! You, naive reader, are correct in going, "HOLY CRAP WTF." Any Christian apologists who are like "God had very good reasons, probably relating to sex being evil, for all this being a cool thing to do" are WRONG WRONG WRONG and you are correctly recognizing this as one of the most fucked-up passages in literature, which is meant to be SO SUPER FUCKED UP that you will accept as inevitable and even good the forthcoming search for a human king, a total sea-change in how Israel views its relationship with God that required a shit-ton of propaganda to support it.
Now sometimes it's helpful to have historical knowledge (the Parable of the Talents takes on a really different complexion when you know Ancient Near Eastern economic theories), but with the human relationship stuff, leaving aside a normal amount of historical patriarchy, anything that seems fucked up? Probably IS fucked up, and you are reading it correctly, and it's fucked up for a rhetorical reason that you have a better chance of identifying than someone who's ideologically committed to the Bible having no fucked-up bits. It's fucked-up for a reason! You're reading it right! That's meant to come through! Your Christian friends who think that's not fucked up are disturbed and disturbing individuals!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:17 PM on April 27, 2018 [17 favorites]
Interesting to see what people read in school
At my high school, "Burr" was a notorious assignment
posted by thelonius at 5:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
At my high school, "Burr" was a notorious assignment
posted by thelonius at 5:18 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
20 Books You Don't Have To Read and 21 You Should Read InsteadAwesome: forty-one books I should read!
Seriously, don't tell me what not to read. I managed to get my hands on this one, and I'll eventually make it through this list too.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 8:41 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
still do not get why Catcher in the Rye is considered a great book. Maybe I read it too early (it was assigned in 8th grade English), but even at the time, I saw Holden as a vapid character who had created all of his own problems.
I'm probably sounding way more elitist than I mean to* when I say stuff like this, but no one except teenagers really thinks Catcher in the Rye is a great book (or more precisely a "Great Book.") It's one a lot of high schoolers at least used to identify with--I loved it back then--it's got a solid "voice" and some good points to start discussions. So it makes the canon of things that get widely read in high school. But it's not like any list of essential literary giants goes anything like "Joyce, Proust, Dickens, Woolf and . . . Salinger." He just doesn't belong.
I remember Allan Bloom--who I reference to give the Great Books elitists' view, not because I think you should agree--but I remember him complaining that no one in college came in reading anything anymore, people who thought they were readers actually thought crap like Catcher in the Rye or The Fountainhead were good. (He does say that at least the Catcher types could learn.)
But a lot of the "canon" is really just stuff that high school teachers have found they can teach, then they hang around forever because parents who haven't read that much since high school actually think they are irreplaceable literature. Being taught in high school is not really a quality endorsement. I do find it funny when people get invested defending them. I love Huck Finn and would never want it forgotten, but I've come around it should definitely be dumped from high school if the N-word and other racism makes it too distracting to teach. Doubly so for most of the other things.
*Or have any right to, as a glance at GoodReads will reveal the schlock I read.
posted by mark k at 8:49 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'm probably sounding way more elitist than I mean to* when I say stuff like this, but no one except teenagers really thinks Catcher in the Rye is a great book (or more precisely a "Great Book.") It's one a lot of high schoolers at least used to identify with--I loved it back then--it's got a solid "voice" and some good points to start discussions. So it makes the canon of things that get widely read in high school. But it's not like any list of essential literary giants goes anything like "Joyce, Proust, Dickens, Woolf and . . . Salinger." He just doesn't belong.
I remember Allan Bloom--who I reference to give the Great Books elitists' view, not because I think you should agree--but I remember him complaining that no one in college came in reading anything anymore, people who thought they were readers actually thought crap like Catcher in the Rye or The Fountainhead were good. (He does say that at least the Catcher types could learn.)
But a lot of the "canon" is really just stuff that high school teachers have found they can teach, then they hang around forever because parents who haven't read that much since high school actually think they are irreplaceable literature. Being taught in high school is not really a quality endorsement. I do find it funny when people get invested defending them. I love Huck Finn and would never want it forgotten, but I've come around it should definitely be dumped from high school if the N-word and other racism makes it too distracting to teach. Doubly so for most of the other things.
*Or have any right to, as a glance at GoodReads will reveal the schlock I read.
posted by mark k at 8:49 PM on April 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
Bron: "Count of Monte Cristo >> The Stars My Destination (~1200 pgs vs 250)"
Both of them are really good, though
OK, this is bait I can't resist. I love Dumas and let me offer my bona fides: I read all the Musketeers cycle, including the interminable thousands of pages between the first half of Vicomte and The Man in the Iron Mask that barely have the musketeers themselves; the underrated Valois romances; Women's War, the Black Tulip and lots of other mostly forgotten bits. I've done Count of Monte Cristo twice.
And the dirty secret is it's not good. It's missing the Dumas humor** which it replaces with philosophical monologues that were done better by many other authors at the time. As an adventure story, it takes like 900 pages to wreak any terrible vengeance.
My vote on what it should be replaced with (not that I mind Bester) is The Khaavren Romances by Stephen Brust. The preeminent Hungarian-American Trotskyist fantasy novelist's homage to Dumas.
**Possible exception for the ten page discussion trying to discuss the count to eat a grape, which I'm not sure is intentionally funny.
posted by mark k at 9:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Both of them are really good, though
OK, this is bait I can't resist. I love Dumas and let me offer my bona fides: I read all the Musketeers cycle, including the interminable thousands of pages between the first half of Vicomte and The Man in the Iron Mask that barely have the musketeers themselves; the underrated Valois romances; Women's War, the Black Tulip and lots of other mostly forgotten bits. I've done Count of Monte Cristo twice.
And the dirty secret is it's not good. It's missing the Dumas humor** which it replaces with philosophical monologues that were done better by many other authors at the time. As an adventure story, it takes like 900 pages to wreak any terrible vengeance.
My vote on what it should be replaced with (not that I mind Bester) is The Khaavren Romances by Stephen Brust. The preeminent Hungarian-American Trotskyist fantasy novelist's homage to Dumas.
**Possible exception for the ten page discussion trying to discuss the count to eat a grape, which I'm not sure is intentionally funny.
posted by mark k at 9:05 PM on April 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
But a lot of the "canon" is really just stuff that high school teachers have found they can teach, then they hang around forever because parents who haven't read that much since high school actually think they are irreplaceable literature.
This sounds about right. We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull and uninvolving except for the interesting bit of information that breaking a bone can kill you. I also didn't get into The Catcher in the Rye. Whatever problems Orwell or Twain might have had as people, their writing was much more engaging to me than the stories of boarding school boys with problems.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:25 PM on April 27, 2018
This sounds about right. We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull and uninvolving except for the interesting bit of information that breaking a bone can kill you. I also didn't get into The Catcher in the Rye. Whatever problems Orwell or Twain might have had as people, their writing was much more engaging to me than the stories of boarding school boys with problems.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:25 PM on April 27, 2018
Also: instead of the Bible, you should read the Ramayana, not least because it's equally door-opening, for Indian and SE Asian culture.
Yes! And also the Mahabharata, which has it all. Whenever people say the Bible is the greatest story ever told, I am like, have you read this other one? It's the Bible and the Iliad and the Odyssey and all of Shakespeare's history plays rolled into one, with a dash of soap opera for good measure. I grew up with these stories, as well as the 90+ episode BR Chopra miniseries and I wish they were more well known in the West.
posted by basalganglia at 11:01 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
Yes! And also the Mahabharata, which has it all. Whenever people say the Bible is the greatest story ever told, I am like, have you read this other one? It's the Bible and the Iliad and the Odyssey and all of Shakespeare's history plays rolled into one, with a dash of soap opera for good measure. I grew up with these stories, as well as the 90+ episode BR Chopra miniseries and I wish they were more well known in the West.
posted by basalganglia at 11:01 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]
mark k: "My vote on what it should be replaced with (not that I mind Bester) is The Khaavren Romances by Stephen Brust. The preeminent Hungarian-American Trotskyist fantasy novelist's homage to Dumas."
This is where things come down to taste. I thought The Phoenix Guards was great, Five Hundred Years After was okay, and the last three I powered through mostly because I wanted the backstory to Dragaera.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:59 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
This is where things come down to taste. I thought The Phoenix Guards was great, Five Hundred Years After was okay, and the last three I powered through mostly because I wanted the backstory to Dragaera.
posted by Chrysostom at 11:59 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
to follow up on what eyebrows mcgee said, from samuel 8
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
most christians don't believe the bible - they believe what they've been TOLD to think about the bible
posted by pyramid termite at 2:08 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
most christians don't believe the bible - they believe what they've been TOLD to think about the bible
posted by pyramid termite at 2:08 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull
I was never assigned Catcher in the Rye or Separate Peace in school but I read them both when I was in high school. Holden Caulfield reminded me mostly of people I didn't like, the poor little rich kids who moped about being privileged. So I never connected with it all that strongly. I didn't mind Separate Peace but I went to a boarding school for a year (I read it the summer after I had gone) so it resonated somewhat. But I can totally see how it wouldn't connect with a lot of people.
Overall, I think I must have been comparatively lucky in high school as I didn't have too many I hated and some in fact I liked (S. E. Hinton's the Outsiders, Faulker's As I Lay Dying, Cather's My Antonia) and books I found, at the time, to be thought-provoking (Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Camus' L'Étranger, Thoreau (some of his essays and Walden)). A beloved Canadian book I read in high school which I didn't like at the time, however, as an adult I grew to like was Margaret Lawrence's Stone Angel.
In an effort to make sure my son was aware of the many stories from all the world religions (partially to counter my evangelical relatives) we read Sanjay Patel's awesome version of the Ramayana. It certainly put the tired old children's bible story books I had as a kid to shame.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:09 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
I was never assigned Catcher in the Rye or Separate Peace in school but I read them both when I was in high school. Holden Caulfield reminded me mostly of people I didn't like, the poor little rich kids who moped about being privileged. So I never connected with it all that strongly. I didn't mind Separate Peace but I went to a boarding school for a year (I read it the summer after I had gone) so it resonated somewhat. But I can totally see how it wouldn't connect with a lot of people.
Overall, I think I must have been comparatively lucky in high school as I didn't have too many I hated and some in fact I liked (S. E. Hinton's the Outsiders, Faulker's As I Lay Dying, Cather's My Antonia) and books I found, at the time, to be thought-provoking (Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Camus' L'Étranger, Thoreau (some of his essays and Walden)). A beloved Canadian book I read in high school which I didn't like at the time, however, as an adult I grew to like was Margaret Lawrence's Stone Angel.
In an effort to make sure my son was aware of the many stories from all the world religions (partially to counter my evangelical relatives) we read Sanjay Patel's awesome version of the Ramayana. It certainly put the tired old children's bible story books I had as a kid to shame.
posted by Ashwagandha at 2:09 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]
This is where things come down to taste. I thought The Phoenix Guards was great, Five Hundred Years After was okay, and the last three I powered through mostly because I wanted the backstory to Dragaera.
My immediate thought seeing this comment, yeah, it is overlong and spotty in places, but that is what an homage to Dumas should look like! (I did like the "Khaavren in middle age" elements better than it sounds like you did but I admit there are chunks I've totally forgotten.)
We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull
Yeah, that's another one that seems ubiquitous in high school English and AFAIK nowhere else. I don't think I've thought about it at all except in the context of "why would they teach that?"
posted by mark k at 10:43 AM on April 29, 2018
My immediate thought seeing this comment, yeah, it is overlong and spotty in places, but that is what an homage to Dumas should look like! (I did like the "Khaavren in middle age" elements better than it sounds like you did but I admit there are chunks I've totally forgotten.)
We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull
Yeah, that's another one that seems ubiquitous in high school English and AFAIK nowhere else. I don't think I've thought about it at all except in the context of "why would they teach that?"
posted by mark k at 10:43 AM on April 29, 2018
We had to read A Separate Peace in high school, which I found deadly dull
It sold really well rebranded as "The Kite Runner"
posted by thelonius at 10:53 AM on April 29, 2018
It sold really well rebranded as "The Kite Runner"
posted by thelonius at 10:53 AM on April 29, 2018
On judging the canon based on modern standards: no. No no no no. Failing to conceive of women or black people or whoever as actual people is, if you’re a writer, a fundamental failure of art. Meeting that very low bar doesn’t even require you to not be sexist or racist! Tolstoy, for instance. Saying you judge them by different standards is just weird, because it doesn’t make the failure of art any less fail-y. I don’t care if they were terrible people in life, but if they write everyone but white men as stick figures, then they just weren’t very good. The fact that this hasn’t seemed important is just a testament to how much white men have dominated critical discourse.
I mean, Christ. Talk about playing on easy mode.
Maybe related: Fahrenheit 451 is garbage. Fight me.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:30 AM on May 1, 2018
I mean, Christ. Talk about playing on easy mode.
Maybe related: Fahrenheit 451 is garbage. Fight me.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:30 AM on May 1, 2018
(I was not assigned Catcher in the Rye in my US high school and have not yet read it, in case anyone wants data points.)
Frowner, thank you -- no joke -- for saddening me about Orwell, whose work I love so much. I'm glad to know this context even though it makes it harder to just love the work.
Seconding basalganglia's Mahabharata recommendation! I started with the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version and can now enjoy lots of translations, remixes, etc.
I poke into the Christian Bible every now and again, and particularly value chewing on the confusing bits (and seeing Paul as an overwhelmed, exasperated movement organizer). Eyebrows McGee, if you felt like expanding on "(the Parable of the Talents takes on a really different complexion when you know Ancient Near Eastern economic theories)" I would appreciate it.
posted by brainwane at 10:55 AM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Frowner, thank you -- no joke -- for saddening me about Orwell, whose work I love so much. I'm glad to know this context even though it makes it harder to just love the work.
Seconding basalganglia's Mahabharata recommendation! I started with the Amar Chitra Katha comic book version and can now enjoy lots of translations, remixes, etc.
I poke into the Christian Bible every now and again, and particularly value chewing on the confusing bits (and seeing Paul as an overwhelmed, exasperated movement organizer). Eyebrows McGee, if you felt like expanding on "(the Parable of the Talents takes on a really different complexion when you know Ancient Near Eastern economic theories)" I would appreciate it.
posted by brainwane at 10:55 AM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Schadenfrau: consider the abuse heaped on Mark Twain for what he considered an accurate portrayal of race as he experienced it. Its hard to imagine one today the has the knowledge to second guess him.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:05 PM on May 1, 2018
posted by SemiSalt at 6:05 PM on May 1, 2018
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