ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart

MerriedxReldnahc said:
There were kids in my class whining about reading 200 page young adult novels (this was 9th grade or so, so that is pretty damn pathetic) while I was trying very hard to absorb the 1400+ pages of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
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Imagine trying to discuss Animorphs or some shit and this kid comes along and wants to break out the Shirer instead (check out his biography on Ghandi though it's lit af)
 
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gangweedfan said:
Pretty sure people on that board dont read books, they just whine.
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Board culture went to hell sometime around '13 and '14. It's been limping along ever since. I visit maybe once every six months and the last I looked there was someone trying to gauge people's thoughts on an NYT best-selling mystery novel that's part of a franchise and the science fiction/fantasy colony hasn't just persisted but also grown like a tumor.

I think it's safe to say most of the people on /lit/ are no longer there to cultivate themselves but to give off the appearance that they have.
 
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Plastic Inevitable said:
I'll see your Atlas Shrugged and I'll raise you The Fountainhead.

And I'll counter that these are books people read to make them SEEM smart. AND FAIL.
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The Fountainhead is way better than Atlas Shrugged. And tbh, I enjoyed TF. She did have great talent as a writer. And by that, I mean in creating worlds with words and making language nice and aesthetically pleasing to read. I think you can enjoy it for the good writing. And besides, it's like 600 pages. You might as well have some fun with it. It's not a given that you'll become a randroid if you enjoy it much like you won't be a commie after reading some Marx.
 
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The only one that pops into my head with the mention of Marx, is Mein Kampf, you know who wrote it, seems like most of everyone who reads it is just trying to base what Hitler wrote in that small time frame of his life as the beginning of his 'evil reign' or whatever, it's retarded and I still want to find a copy of it.
 
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DanteAlighieri said:
It's okay, it's somewhat how I feel about the "genre" such works as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, and Metamorphoses fall into. Few people read them with the intention of learning or for their literary influence.
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Overly Sarcastic Productions 8 minute videos will give you a deeper understanding of the divine comedies than reading them if you have no grounding in theological history and phd in fucking spirituality for the 3rd one.
 
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Astrophysics for people in a hurry.jpg

It's really short and basically just an episode of Cosmos in text form
 
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Agent Orange said:
The Conquest Of Bread, if only because it seems to be hip with Breadtubers and other pseudo-intellectual Progs and Wannabe Lefties.
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I read the book. It was overall pretty dry, but gave a very :optimistic: outlook about the European continent all joining together to create a communist Utopia (Kropkin believed that the supplies were all there, they just had to be redistributed). The biggest optimism I got from the book wasn’t about communism, but more about all the European countries getting along and distributing things evenly between countries. The book goes over lots of math too, but a lot of it is outdated due to different economic circumstances of today.
 
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Most of these have already been mentioned earlier in the thread, but here's my picks.

White Fragility
Das Kapital
The Communist Manifesto
The Conquest of Bread
Atlas Shrugged
The Fountainhead
The God Delusion
Mein Kampf
Siege
The Motorcycle Diaries
The City of God
Anything written by Mencius Moldbug, Slavoj Zizek, Sartre, Foucault, or Mao Zedong
 
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