ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart

Grad english lit students who say they specialize in postmodern literature.

If I had to drop another book to add to this pile, it'd have to be the girl with the dragon tattoo.
I read that because I watched the movie on Netflix at some point. I enjoyed it at the time but it's entirely forgettable. As in I literally cannot remember the first thing about it.

Assuming this thread is for books people read just to feel smart, but that then don't make anyone smarter (as opposed to books people read to feel smart that actually do make them smarter):

The Sorrows Of Young Werther
Naked Lunch
Lolita
Naked Lunch is both pretentious and degenerate at the same time and is difficult for the sake of being difficult. 0/10.
Lolita is what Cuties SAYS it wants to be, but still, do we need a book to tell us only crazy weirdos want to fuck children and they're bad people for it? No. 2/10.
 
100% agree about Lovecraft. I started reading (listening to the audio books) a while ago and claims like "every story ends with the hero being killed or going insane" are simply false.

Call of Cthulhu in particular is so far removed from the popular opinion of it that I think I might have listened to the wrong story. Most of the story is a bunch of professors talking about a statue, and at the end some fishermen wake up Cthulhu and escape.

Just like Starship Troopers, I've yet to see the racism and antisemitism anti-fans keep talking about.

Edit:

The scene in the Black Adder special where he punches him "for every school boy and girl for the next 400 years" is so satisfying.

To be fair, even as a fan of Lovecraft I have to admit he was incredibly racist. Though that was part of what drew me to him, honestly. It's a very old timey subtle racism that isn't I think in any way hateful. It's how he was raised, and frankly how a lot of people were raised back then and it was a huge influence on his work and personal life. The Rats In The Walls has to be one of my favorite examples. HP named his cat Niggerman.
 
To be fair, even as a fan of Lovecraft I have to admit he was incredibly racist. Though that was part of what drew me to him, honestly. It's a very old timey subtle racism that isn't I think in any way hateful. It's how he was raised, and frankly how a lot of people were raised back then and it was a huge influence on his work and personal life. The Rats In The Walls has to be one of my favorite examples. HP named his cat Niggerman.
Let's not forget that he was massively xenophobic and mentally ill and somehow it's not all comically racist.
 
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Lovecraft has some kind of Poe's law about him where the longer you talk about him on the internet, the more likely you are to mention he was racist.


Anyway I read The Metamorphosis by Kafka in German to feel smart once. It was aight I guess, probably would've liked it more if I read it in English tbh
 
HP named his cat Niggerman.
I don't see that as particularly racist. It's a black cat with a silly name. It's not that far removed from the siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, or a dolphin called "Flipper".

The way people talk about the stories, I was half expecting "Kill niggers, gas jews, maybe there a monster.". From the stories I've read so far, Lovecraft is racist in the same way a sitcom is sexist. They could be read that way if skewed through a modern American politics lens, but I don't think it was the intent.
 
I don't see that as particularly racist. It's a black cat with a silly name. It's not that far removed from the siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, or a dolphin called "Flipper".

The way people talk about the stories, I was half expecting "Kill niggers, gas jews, maybe there a monster.". From the stories I've read so far, Lovecraft is racist in the same way a sitcom is sexist. They could be read that way if skewed through a modern American politics lens, but I don't think it was the intent.
In the original Shadows Over Innsmouth story there's a lot of talk about racially impure people etc, if i remember correctly he attributes the fish people's ugly faces to them probably being inbred foreigners. Then there's the story with the german in the submarine one which I recall had some talk of Aryan superiority. It's generally not big stuff or even stuff I care about. Lovecraft being racist doesn't bother me, but he was definitely racist.
 
I been meaning to get into Phillip k. Dick for a long time but I notice he seems to attract a peculiar kind of "what if lolweed420 and like reality is not reality maaan" kind of audience.

I can't comment on the content yet but the people shilling definitely fit the bill as tards who think they are too smart for this world.
 
Hilary Mantel. I don't know what it is, but that present tense screenplay style of writing is bloody awful
 
To be fair, even as a fan of Lovecraft I have to admit he was incredibly racist. Though that was part of what drew me to him, honestly. It's a very old timey subtle racism that isn't I think in any way hateful. It's how he was raised, and frankly how a lot of people were raised back then and it was a huge influence on his work and personal life. The Rats In The Walls has to be one of my favorite examples. HP named his cat Niggerman.

Correction: His parents named the cat Niggerman.

In the original Shadows Over Innsmouth story there's a lot of talk about racially impure people etc, if i remember correctly he attributes the fish people's ugly faces to them probably being inbred foreigners. Then there's the story with the german in the submarine one which I recall had some talk of Aryan superiority. It's generally not big stuff or even stuff I care about. Lovecraft being racist doesn't bother me, but he was definitely racist.

Shadow over Innsmouth is interesting, since the horror is inbreeding with fish people Deep Ones. Now, that could be easily seen as metaphor for mixing races and on some level, it probably is, but it's described as just as horrifying when it happens to some Pacific Islanders. It's more anti-immigration in the story, since Lovecraft in general wanted different nations and ethnicities to stay in their home country. I know being anti-immigration and wanting people who immigrate into a country to assimilate instead of trying to change the country is seen as horrible racism, but I have hard time caring. The fish people looking ugly is attributed to inbreeding rather than foreigners, though. Lovecraft was also interested in all the hereditary degenerations caused by inbreeding and there's a bunch of stories on the them (Picture in the House, Dunwich Horror, Lurking Fear etc.) IIRC, he was afraid of hereditary mental illness because both of his parents went insane.

The German submarine one is the Temple and it was written during WW1 and all the talk about German superiority in it is definitely a parody. The submarine captain is very much not a good guy, since there's a bit where he has a film of survivors from sunk ship safely on lifeboats recorded for propaganda purposes and then he has them mowed down with machine guns. Lovecraft volunteered for the army in WW1 and was obviously rejected on medical grounds, but he was still enthusiastic about the US joining.
 
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, or Mao Zedong
We've argued over whether literature is good or not before but I'd actually agree with all of these, since they're mainly tiresome political treatises (though some are far more extreme than others - I wouldn't put Dawkins in with Hitler and Che Guevara) rather than works with any real artistic or literary merit. I'd also add Sartre, De Beauvoir, and other French communists to that list, along with anything by Julius "rape should be legal and fascism wasn't extreme enough" Evola.
 
Lolita is what Cuties SAYS it wants to be, but still, do we need a book to tell us only crazy weirdos want to fuck children and they're bad people for it? No. 2/10.

From what I can tell, Lolita was pretty much a product of its time and its aims made more sense in the era it was written in

Most people in the 50's tended to be blissfully unaware of a serious issue at the time and at most, thought that all pedophiles were either creepy hobo strangers with candy or backwoods rednecks and inner-city joggers who were far removed from "decent society"

The idea of a pedophile sociopath hiding in plain sight as a middle-class suburbanite was shocking back in 1955
 
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To be fair, even as a fan of Lovecraft I have to admit he was incredibly racist. Though that was part of what drew me to him, honestly. It's a very old timey subtle racism that isn't I think in any way hateful. It's how he was raised, and frankly how a lot of people were raised back then and it was a huge influence on his work and personal life. The Rats In The Walls has to be one of my favorite examples. HP named his cat Niggerman.
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the Ward family's "venerable black cat" was named Nig :story:

Lovecraft was racist in the way most people were racist then; non-whites weren't hate-inducing (unless they were super degraded, and then it was more reflexive, atavistic physical revulsion). They were just inferior, that's how things were, proceed with your life. No need to get all hot and bothered about it. Except when their ancient eldritch horror cults snag an intelligent, sensitive white man like HP Lovecraft and rape him manipulate him into using his superior Caucasianness to summon amoral cosmic entities
 
What's the deal with the hate on War & Peace? I'm reading it now for the first time and I'm really, really enjoying it. It's a compelling story, I'm enjoying the relationships and the larger commentary I believe Tolstoy is setting up could be incredibly fascinating and really relevant to today. Why don't people like it?
I'm unfortunately going to double down on the Tolstoy hatred. I've read huge sections of War and Peace and remember very little from them, because most of the first part just wasn't enjoyable. The book is rifle with his Narodnism which often comes off as signalling more than anything else. I'll spoiler the rest in case people haven't read it:
And as much as it was present in the novel, the whole argument against Great Man Theory is stupid, the fact that it serves such a big role in the story is offputting, and the characters and the ideals they represent aren't nearly as developed as those in someone like Dostoyevsky. And the final essay against the theory at the end of the book isn't very convincing.
 
In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the Ward family's "venerable black cat" was named Nig :story:

Lovecraft was racist in the way most people were racist then; non-whites weren't hate-inducing (unless they were super degraded, and then it was more reflexive, atavistic physical revulsion). They were just inferior, that's how things were, proceed with your life. No need to get all hot and bothered about it. Except when their ancient eldritch horror cults snag an intelligent, sensitive white man like HP Lovecraft and rape him manipulate him into using his superior Caucasianness to summon amoral cosmic entities
Glad you mentioned this. Someone earlier said HP’s parents named his cat. They literally couldn’t have because his dad was dead by then and his mom might have been dead by then too I’m pretty sure and besides that he wasn’t even talking to his mother by that point.
 
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From what I can tell, Lolita was pretty much a product of its time and its aims made more sense in the era it was written in

Most people in the 50's tended to be blissfully unaware of a serious issue at the time and at most, thought that all pedophiles were either creepy hobo strangers with candy or backwoods rednecks and inner-city joggers who were far removed from "decent society"

The idea of a pedophile sociopath hiding in plain sight as a middle-class suburbanite was shocking back in 1955
Early psychologists were shocked at how much child abuse they uncovered from middle class patients. The matter was not discussed enough back then. Jimmy Savile got away with a whole career of abuse covered up by the BBC decades later.

Nabokov was also one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language and his writing has immense artistic merit regardless of the subject matter, unlike the political authors like Kropotkin people are listing here.
 
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Moral Landscape

TBF, I'm not mad at Joseph Campbell's work. I just didn't find it all that useful to me and happens to fit the criteria of a pretentions book. The Moral Landscape, on the other hand, actively irritates me when I try to reread it. My most hated passage is on page 135-6:
Sam Harris said:
In a legal context, some scholars have already begun to worry that reliable lie detection will constitute an infringement of a person's Fifth Amendment [...] However, the Fifth Amendment has already succumbed to advances in technology. [...] In fact, the prohibition against compelled testimony itself appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age. [...] We have no choice but to rely upon our criminal justice system despite the fact that judges and juries are very poorly calibrated lie detectors, prone to both type I and type II errors. Anything that can improve the performance of this antiquated system, even slightly, will raise the quotient of justice in our world.

Why does this passage irritate me in particular? Because it's the philosophical basis of removing constitutional rights for Da Science. We see this kind of philosophy in action from the COVID response. Because of selective basic
biology knowledge, various state governments such as California and New York have severely curtailed public gathering of any kind if not banned outright. Such a drastic change on our society has decimated the amusement park economy (which Anaheim is entirely reliant upon), suspended public education with an even less effective form of it,* fucked over malls, restaurants, and theater chains, and compels everyone to wear a mask simply to commit acts of commerce. Even Black Friday was kinda mediocre this year.

Why? Because the right to assembly "appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age." Sam Harris, unwittingly or not, did real damage to society with a pretentious book.

*Ever try to keep the attention of children in a classroom? Now, try imagining how to do that when they've got a Minecraft/Fortnite tab open.
 
The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Moral Landscape

TBF, I'm not mad at Joseph Campbell's work. I just didn't find it all that useful to me and happens to fit the criteria of a pretentions book. The Moral Landscape, on the other hand, actively irritates me when I try to reread it. My most hated passage is on page 135-6:


Why does this passage irritate me in particular? Because it's the philosophical basis of removing constitutional rights for Da Science. We see this kind of philosophy in action from the COVID response. Because of selective basic
biology knowledge, various state governments such as California and New York have severely curtailed public gathering of any kind if not banned outright. Such a drastic change on our society has decimated the amusement park economy (which Anaheim is entirely reliant upon), suspended public education with an even less effective form of it,* fucked over malls, restaurants, and theater chains, and compels everyone to wear a mask simply to commit acts of commerce. Even Black Friday was kinda mediocre this year.

Why? Because the right to assembly "appears to be a relic of a more superstitious age." Sam Harris, unwittingly or not, did real damage to society with a pretentious book.

*Ever try to keep the attention of children in a classroom? Now, try imagining how to do that when they've got a Minecraft/Fortnite tab open.
I eas listening to an audiobook course about greek myths one time and not long after the intro the professor actually went out of her way to calk campbell out and sperg a bit about how its not real antrhopology and is mostly speculative fiction. Apparently he has a lot of people in that field who have a bone to pick with him.

I personally like his stuff but i am no scholar of religious history. Its just interesting in a literary way, same as jung's .
 
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