ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart

[Prehistoric Jazz]

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson has aged as speculative fiction but I still love them. Greg Bear's Eon books too.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

Harry Potter series.
At least, the people who read them seen to think they're intelligent.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

If you see any random black person in your social studies class, or someone that uses a #BLM hashtag on social media, there’s a strong chance they’ve read this multiple times.

In my experience, the people that read this love to sound insightful about the “black struggle”, when in reality they end up sounding condescending and hypocritical by nature.

Also, they never read the ending where he actually changed his ways and started realizing that his own community needed to change, only for him to get killed by the same black people that only like him due to his radical political beliefs.

It used to be funny, but in retrospect, these people were just annoying.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Disagree. Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy wrote very interesting philosophical treatises.

This is the first time I heard "1601" referred to as a philosophical treatise, but I can't really deny it.

 

[Meat Target]

Tim Wise

Tim Wise needs more publicity, just so the world can see how fucking vile and hate-filled he is. He is the Fred Phelps of the Church of Wokeism.

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(Although some of them, namely Ulysses, belong to the category 'Books people pretend to have read' because no one other than Joyce himself has read Ulysses and you can't convince me otherwise )

Catch-22 is not only an accurate depiction of the military, but also the corporate world. Jobbers like Colonel Cathcart have no qualms about sacrificing others to advance their careers.

 

[Punished Benis]

Great Expectations, if mandatory high school reading can count as such. The denseness of the text isn't the issue. There are lots of dense books that have artistic or entertainment merit, Cormac McCarthy probably being one of my favorite examples.

Great Expectations is the Star Wars: the Last Jedi of 19th century literature and the single worst work Dickens ever wrote. It tries to subvert one's expectations (no pun intended) for the worse (to Dickens' credit, growing up often does just that), but to no benefit of the story. Even a coming of age tale needs some form of structure, some payoff. Nope, GE is just "well, it sucked, and now the big change is that it's going to suck harder".

Pip is so pathetic you stop feeling sorry for him, and never really grows stronger from his suffering, Haversham is a character whose tragic backstory utterly fails to justify or make one sympathize with her endpoint as a character, whose death isn't even satisfying, but merely a "circumstances must change" button being pressed. Stella is... Well, a decently accurate picture of a girl given all the money she could want and zero emotional fulfillment, but there's never a payoff with it.

In short, the fact that it's one of Dickens' most famous works is a travesty and it sucks Victorian laudanum farts.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

"Candide" by Voltaire. Seemed like a good choice at the time. Should probably give it another go cause I can't remember a single fucking thing about it.

"Candide" is funny. How can you dislike a genuinely funny book?

Any book on philosophy.

How anybody can read that crap is beyond me.

Start with the Greeks.

 

[EricArthurBlair]

"The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" and anything else that sells autistic nihilism as credible philosophy. Also "Simulacra and Simulation" or any postmodern, deconstruction isn't text. Absolute bullshit.

Any Sagan or Hawking book that you can readily find in Barnes & Noble.
The God Delusion
Marie Kondo's books

Dude The God Delusion? Fuck you Bible thumper!

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.

1984.

I took that personally

 

[Andrew Neiman]

"The Conspiracy Against the Human Race" and anything else that sells autistic nihilism as credible philosophy.

You know, I read "Songs of a Dead Dreamer" and was surprised by how so-so it was. I liked it, but I always scratch my head when people refer to Ligotti as some sort of visionary. There was absolutely nothing in the book that was better than Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith. Maybe I read the wrong Ligotti book, or maybe not.

 

[Miss Misery]

I took that personally

I took your newfag triple-posting personally. Learn to edit.

 

[LateNightMuffin]

Raymond Carver. John Cheever. John Fowles.

And of course Judith Butler.

 

[Fictional Character]

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(Although some of them, namely Ulysses, belong to the category 'Books people pretend to have read' because no one other than Joyce himself has read Ulysses and you can't convince me otherwise )

It's a damn shame that the old man who had a daily podcast about reading a page from the Ulysses and explaining it in depth died before he was finished.

 

[Mossad Facade]

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If you see any random black person in your social studies class, or someone that uses a #BLM hashtag on social media, there’s a strong chance they’ve read this multiple times.

In my experience, the people that read this love to sound insightful about the “black struggle”, when in reality they end up sounding condescending and hypocritical by nature.

Also, they never read the ending where he actually changed his ways and started realizing that his own community needed to change, only for him to get killed by the same black people that only like him due to his radical political beliefs.

It used to be funny, but in retrospect, these people were just annoying.

Most liberals who love it have only read the first half where Malcolm is more racist than Stormfront.

 

[TheRatcatcher]

Dune for me at least. I think the book has some very good messages about how we all need to rely and expand on our natural skills as humans instead of having to rely on vicarious means of technology and automation that will ultimately lead to a shiftless society that will degenerate because of how everyone is "happy". With the recent film being talked about among mainstream audiences, it seems like people are more so willing to just take the aesthetics of it without having Herbert's philosophy because he's an evil white Christian man who hates fags

 

[Tootsie Bear]

Freakonomics

Maybe it's because I grew up on the internet after 9/11 and the War on Terror, there were a ridiculous "documentaries" where the makers pulled the curtains back to expose reality to brainwashed sheeple. At the same time there were best sellers based on new age fads like Kabbalah and numerous other self-help books. As such I see people who see Freakonomics as gospel are people who don't understand economics and how the world works, but want to look smart buying the book in mass numbers and now it's gathering dust on a shelf.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

I took that personally

A book can be a great book and a book people read to feel smart. I think that describes "1984" accurately.

Raymond Carver.

I'm interested to hear your justification for this.

(Although some of them, namely Ulysses, belong to the category 'Books people pretend to have read' because no one other than Joyce himself has read Ulysses and you can't convince me otherwise )

I'm reading Ulysses. Thankfully I have a set of annotations to explain all the intricate references to Irish stuff.

 

[Law]

Arthur Schopenhauer was a crusty pedophile incel. I think people buy his books to look smart but would find a lot of what he says just gross and dumb if they really looked into it.

 

[Maskull]

I'm reading Ulysses. Thankfully I have a set of annotations to explain all the intricate references to Irish stuff.

I feel it to be almost a necessity to read Richard Ellman’s biography of the man before picking up any of his novels. Joyce put so much of himself into his novels that you can hardly disentangle the author from the literature.

 

[Andrew Neiman]

I feel it to be almost a necessity to read Richard Ellman’s biography of the man before picking up any of his novels. Joyce put so much of himself into his novels that you can hardly disentangle the author from the literature.

On one hand, perhaps you're right. On the other hand, I really don't feel like reading a whole biography before picking up this book. I think I'm either going to read it without the biography, or I'm not going to read it at all.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

Great Expectations is the Star Wars: the Last Jedi of 19th century literature and the single worst work Dickens ever wrote. It tries to subvert one's expectations (no pun intended) for the worse (to Dickens' credit, growing up often does just that), but to no benefit of the story. Even a coming of age tale needs some form of structure, some payoff. Nope, GE is just "well, it sucked, and now the big change is that it's going to suck harder".

It was first published as a serial and I have a strong suspicion that Dickens was just making it along the way.

You're right. Great Expectations just goes nowhere. That's the biggest problem with it. The climax is just so...bizarre.