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- Apr 14, 2019
ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart
- Thread starter gangweedfan
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2015
Obligatory:
A lot of philosophical works fall into this category. A Thousand Plateau's: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one such. Garbage. Absolute garbage. Just read Artaud.
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- Feb 3, 2013
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- Sep 24, 2020
Oh good, we're doing Alan Moore.
Put me down in the list that thinks Watchmen is overrated. It's got a decent examination of several broken people as they stumble their way through costumed vigilantism, with a couple of good twists, but has it's head way too far up it's own ass for it's own good. Too much moany nihilism, which is the main thing that annoys me about Doctor Manhattan's 'superior detached perception', and meandering nonsense. Say what you like about Zach Snyder, but he was 100% right to cut that Black Freighter shit, and a lot of other crap, out of the film.
I read somewhere once that the big splash panel where Veight/Ozymandias clobbers the would-be assassin is the exact centre of the story, and after that, the second half is a mirror image of the first in some way. Panel structure, I think. At first I thought 'ooo, that's clever', but then I wondered why? Why is it clever? Who's going to notice? What difference does it make to the story? It's a hipster in-joke that only gets pointed out to the plebs so we can be in awe of what a galaxy-brain the writer is.
It's been said before, but Watchmen is only notable because most capeshit before it was as deep as a puddle. Most capeshit after it is as deep as a puddle too, but with an added veneer of Moorian pretentiousness.
The nihilism and even a strong streak of proto-SJWism - political correctness? - grates in some of his other work too. Killing Joke. Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing was one of the first Alan Moore comics I read and I still look kindly on it, but parts of it are hard to stomach at this point. One issue that stands out in my mind is the woman who turns into a werewolf and kills herself because she's got PMT, because her husband is a male and slightly annoying, and because supermarkets and tupperware are marketed to women.
The irony is that his great-grandmother was white.
I have read every Lovecraft and Sherlock Holmes story, at some point. Some I even re-read. They're fun! I don't get why some readers see them as some kind of big-brain achievement though. They're pulpy thrillers through and through. It's like thinking that reading Conan makes you an alpha dog.
I read Sun-Tzu once because I used to be into military history, tactics, and autism. It reads like ancient chinese Jordan Peterson - "tidy your battlefield!" If someone reads it to get ahead in the cuthroat business world, they're probably not suited to that world. YMMV.
I keep a copy of Moby Dick on standby in case of insomnia.
Philip K. Dick is one of my favourite sci-fi writers, though to be honest I know his short stories better than his longer works. His favourite theme is definitely the nature of reality, whether you can trust your own eyes or if things are as they appear. Some are kind of thunk-provoking, some are surely not. Three off the top of my head are We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which was adapted as Total Recall, and is very different to the film; King Of The Elves, which was almost adapted into a Disney movie; and the one where the family dog thinks garbage men are evil monsters stealing his masters trash.
And then his last few stories get really weird.
Give them a try. Ignore the stoners.
On the theme of sci-fi writers, HG Wells. I don't know if he counts as an author of 'books people read to look smart' but he's a little overrated in my view. He gets credit for early genre-defining stories like War Of The Worlds or The Time Machine - and rightly so - but there's a streak of communist rhetoric through most of his work, which is more noticeable in some, and you can't unsee it in his more popular pieces once you're aware of it, or read a little about his personal life. I sat down with an omnibus of his complete works and had to stop partway through the semiautobiographical In The Days Of The Comet, before I even got to the 'sci' part. It was just his self-insert railing about the government, the upper classes, the church, his mother, the girl who wouldn't go out with him, the landowners son she did go out with, everything he could think of. A complete joke of a story.
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- Jun 25, 2013
Millennials don't read books they just watch the movie versions of Harry Potter and Hunger Games and say they read the books. The books are usually better in any case.
As a fan of dystopian literature, people claim they've read Orwell and Huxley to feel "smart" or "educated" but what's going on in some countries makes those worlds look like a mild inconvenience in comparison.
As a fan of dystopian literature, people claim they've read Orwell and Huxley to feel "smart" or "educated" but what's going on in some countries makes those worlds look like a mild inconvenience in comparison.
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- Aug 31, 2020
The Brothers Karamzov
Mea Culpa: I did buy this book for pretentious reasons because I heard nothing but good things about Dostoyevsky, but I just can't bring myself to care about anyone in the book for any reason. I can't remember what happened in the first fifty pages at all.
Which freaked me out because I thought I had developed ADD from using the Internet so much. So I picked up The Quiet Time stories by Dimitri Keriotis to see if that's the case. Those short stories aren't in subjects I care about either, but since I found that I could finish one short story in one sitting, I probably don't have ADD. It's simply a case of not liking the novel.
Mea Culpa: I did buy this book for pretentious reasons because I heard nothing but good things about Dostoyevsky, but I just can't bring myself to care about anyone in the book for any reason. I can't remember what happened in the first fifty pages at all.
Which freaked me out because I thought I had developed ADD from using the Internet so much. So I picked up The Quiet Time stories by Dimitri Keriotis to see if that's the case. Those short stories aren't in subjects I care about either, but since I found that I could finish one short story in one sitting, I probably don't have ADD. It's simply a case of not liking the novel.
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- Jul 22, 2019
In my world, it seems far more common that people just carry books around to seem smart, and this is what I often see;
On the Road
Anything by Dostoevsky
Anything by Crowley (admittedly, he went out of fashion a few years ago)
The Satanic Bible
The Catcher in the Rye
Tropic of Cancer (this is my favourite book, and I remember seeing a girl in a bar with an old copy, so I struck up a conversation a few years ago. She was clearly uncomfortable with the fact that she hadn't read it, and was just carrying it around for bragging rights).
On the Road
Anything by Dostoevsky
Anything by Crowley (admittedly, he went out of fashion a few years ago)
The Satanic Bible
The Catcher in the Rye
Tropic of Cancer (this is my favourite book, and I remember seeing a girl in a bar with an old copy, so I struck up a conversation a few years ago. She was clearly uncomfortable with the fact that she hadn't read it, and was just carrying it around for bragging rights).
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- Jun 24, 2020
I had to read that in high school and it made zero sense. Other than the name "Holden Caulfield", I don't remember anything of any significance about it. Most pointless book ever.
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- Aug 13, 2016
This Spoke Zarathustra, specifically if that's all they read of crazy mustache boy and then proclaim themselves a "Nietzschean".
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- Aug 31, 2020
Holden Caufield is the personification of Gen X; whiny and self-absorbed. He likes to pretend he's counter-culture by calling out the phonies with his snark, but he's an impotent drifter. This cynicism has destroyed him of his natural desire to help children, which he alluded to with vague notions of wanting to be a Catcher rather than a concrete goal like a cop or a teacher.
It's a good character study that got vastly overrated because he said "fuck" a few times.
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- Jun 8, 2015
The lesson of it seems to be "society may suck, but you'll only get back what you give, and even if you "opt out" you grow old and die anyway....what good is a life snarking at a world that doesn't CARE what you think?" but too many people just whittle it down to "society sucks and then you get old and die" as a justification for extremely shitty personal behaviors.
A lot of people in the book only treat Holden badly because he objectively did something to piss them off for no reason other than his "whatever" attitude said there was no point in fulfilling a promise/duty.
He was essentially MTV's Daria, except, he never learns the "lesson" she does - being upset at life's unfairness all time is a good way to never know a moment's peace, and snark doesn't pay the bills.
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- Feb 19, 2017
Anything written by Karl Marx, Slavoj Zizek, Leon Trotsky, Mao, Noam Chomsky, Andrea Dworkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Pyotr Kropotkin, Robin D'Angelo, Tim Wise, W.E.B DuBois or Germaine Greer.
Also, anything written by Ayn Rand, Cotton Mather, John Calvin, Augustine, or Hunter S. Thompson
Also, anything written by Ayn Rand, Cotton Mather, John Calvin, Augustine, or Hunter S. Thompson
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- Feb 19, 2020
TV is now the intellectual medium for snobs who are too good for Facebook and Twitch -- nobody reads lmao, except for YA fiction and "kill whitey" pop sociology that's dumber than television anyway. Oh the sad unwashed peasants, never to know the refined delights of following an epic 22-minute plot punctuated by a laugh track... Married With Children is an experience for the initiated, the elite...
Might be helpful for some to know that in a lot of places, you can get that stuff free from your library, either through streaming or checking out physical copies. (I say this as someone who throws the Teaching Company a ton of money and never streams it for free, oh well. or oh yeah you can pirate them I guess.) I would recommend Robert Greenberg's courses on classical music to anybody slightly interested in the subject.
People keep saying Ayn Rand... maybe, in the sense that reading her books will make you feel like you're smarter than a famous philosopher. ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS AN AUTISTIC RAPIST WHO WAS BETTER THAN EVERYBODY ELSE, THE END. Whereas I'm pretty sure e.g. Thus Spake Zarathustra is actually beyond my capacity to decode and there's something to it, because Nietzsche can be lucid when he cares to be. But naw I didn't understand that shit.
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- Dec 17, 2020
Brave new world, 1984, The man in the high castle, fahrenheit 451, and other "Classics" about A dystopian government.
Flavius Claudius Julianus
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 3, 2020
A lot of the more famous big Russian novels have suffered during to translation. Constance Garnett did a lot of the translations in the 20th century, despite having an extremely limited knowledge of the language. As a result, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol et al sound exactly the same in terms of tone, writing style, vocabulary, etc.
If you want to see where the Russians really shine, pick up some short story collections. Turgenev's Sportman's Notebook is brilliant, as are Kuprinov's tales.
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- Apr 4, 2020
I am yet to meet a person who has read (or claimed to have read) War and Peace for any reason other then the book's reputation as beeg russian novel.
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- Feb 8, 2021
The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentelman.
It's basically 700+ Pages of references only applicaple to the time it was written in with a disjointed narrative by what seems to be a fictional syphilitic noble man.
A must read for any pseudo-philosopist/intellectual such as myself.
Or I'm just too stupid to understand it for the work of art it is.
It's basically 700+ Pages of references only applicaple to the time it was written in with a disjointed narrative by what seems to be a fictional syphilitic noble man.
A must read for any pseudo-philosopist/intellectual such as myself.
Or I'm just too stupid to understand it for the work of art it is.
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2017
Anything on any university subject reading list (Except Law).
Even the sciences will have topics you can just read a meta analysis on and pass with a higher grade than your peers who were emphasising how much of the material they covered.
Laws only exempt because the subject requires people to spend years reading the exact wording of things, just to earn a degree and read the exact same things afterwards.
Even the sciences will have topics you can just read a meta analysis on and pass with a higher grade than your peers who were emphasising how much of the material they covered.
Laws only exempt because the subject requires people to spend years reading the exact wording of things, just to earn a degree and read the exact same things afterwards.
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- Jan 29, 2021
Haven't seen any of her stuff mentioned here, but Judith Butler specifically Gender Trouble. One of the worst written pretentious books I've touched.
Fictional Character
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 13, 2020
People should read Tristram Shandy because it's funny, not because they want to feel smart.