John Lynch has a list of so-called pretentious books — books that are often listed as unread. Wilkins has followed up with his own. It’s a curious list, though; the only ones I’d definitely call pretentious are anything by Rand, and maybe the books by Hawthorne (an author I find unpleasantly bad).
I think we already did this list last fall, however.
Gotta disagree with a few on the list that I’ve read (e.e. Dune pretentious? Only if well-written sci-fi is considered pretentious) but he’s on the money on many of them.
Okay, I was going down the list, privately gloating a bit that I’d read so many apparently “pretentious” books (hey, we all can have our moments of elitist smugness), when I came across this one:
Angels & Demons
Angels and Demons is pretentious? You’ve got to be kidding me.
I am pretty sure all books except the Bible are pretentious and unnecessary!!!!!111
Haha. No, not real;y.
People still read that pretentious piece of fiction called the Bible?
I don’t believe it.
Oh come on! This seems to be compiled by someone who doesn’t like reading for pleasure. I’d like to see a list of books that he DOESN’T consider pretentious. What would that be, “Dick and Jane”?
I also notice that 19th cent lit makes up a good deal of the list. Tastes have changed, certainly, but most of those books were very widely read and popular at the time. It’s anachroistic to call them pretentious. If someone wrote them NOW, maybe.
I think this list is pretentious, actually.
I mean, “anachronistic”.
agree with madaha. Real pretension involves feeling superior to people who enjoy Dan Brown.
Those are just often-recommended books, with a lot of assigned-in-school books among them. “The Life of Pi” is almost lowbrow.
These lists are idotic.
What’s the criteria for pretentiousness? The guy who calls them pretentious couldn’t get through them (or didn’t try)?
Where’s the Bible, for crying out loud? I’ve read it. ALL of it. Most of it doesn’t even work as “literature.”
It takes a lot of damn gall to leave the Bible off the list and include (just to name some of MY favorites): Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, Guns, Germs and Steel, Moby Dick, The Picture of Dorian Gray, THE HOBBIT (?!?!?! Yeah, that’s REAL HARD to read! I think I was ten. Even younger when I read Watership Down) and Pride and Prejudice.
I think someone thinks “pretentious” is a synonym for “too hard for stupid people.”
Totally. And Jane Austen is straightforward realism – the opposite of pretentious. The subject matter may not appeal, but ….I’m wondering if this guy knows what “pretentious” actually means? or has read these books?
It’s not books that are pretentious, it’s authors.
These lists are idotic.
What’s the criteria for pretentiousness? The guy who calls them pretentious couldn’t get through them (or didn’t try)?
Where’s the Bible, for crying out loud? I’ve read it. ALL of it. Most of it doesn’t even work as “literature.”
It takes a lot of damn gall to leave the Bible off the list and include (just to name some of MY favorites): Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, Guns, Germs and Steel, Moby Dick, The Picture of Dorian Gray, THE HOBBIT (?!?!?! Yeah, that’s REAL HARD to read! I think I was ten. Even younger when I read Watership Down) and Pride and Prejudice.
I think someone thinks “pretentious” is a synonym for “too hard for stupid people.”
Well, the Bible and the Iliad definitely can’t be called pretentious – ancient oral culture pretentious? That doesn’t even make sense.
However, I know this going to get me in trouble here, but Tolkien *could* be called pretentious, because his works are medievalizing and he makes up words.
*going to hide now*
Pretentious, as defined by the OED:
Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed; making an exaggerated outward display; ostentatious, showy.
Very few of these books fit that description. I think that what the list-maker was actually trying to say is that people who read these books are often being pretentious (trying to affect greater importance or merit than they possess by making an exaggerated outward display of how they’ve read them).
Etha:
Bush reading “My Pet Goat” – definitely pretentious!
I SWEAR I got a message saying my post didn’t go through.
Pinky swear even.
Ah, none of you 3 has read Freakonomics, well don’t bother…
I am abashed that I’ve read only 32 of the “pretentious” books. It really should be much higher!
The same way we make lists like this as jokes, the neo-cons make lists like this as guideposts for what their “constituents” should actually read or ignore. And these people ACTUALLY listen to them!!! I can see the day that a list like this is being read by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, and then the entire list placed on the forbidden list, Equilibrium-style.
Oh, I’m also an English major along with being a soldier, and I had no idea I was getting such a pretentious degree! It seems like almost every book I loved (along with most of them I hated) during my college reading is on one of these lists.
If the Bible isn’t pretentious then there is no reason to even have a concept of pretension.
It’s the unerring and infallible word of God, for Chrissake.
Ah, ‘pretentious’, the most pretentious word in the English language.
A word everyone love to toss like an accusation at things they don’t like but no one uses correctly.
I’ve read almost 40 of them.
I’m currently reading The Wealth of Nations and William Duiker’s biography of Ho Chi Minh, but I just finished Free Ride and Armed Madhouse.
The list does not include the most pretentious novel of all time:
“Remembrance of Things Past” by Proust
And yes, I have read it …
Axolotl
What about…
Being and time by Heidegger
Critique of pur reason by Kant
Candide by Voltaire
Thus spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
Oh, I forgot, Philosophy is off limits.
It’s definitely pretentious of me, of pretending I’ve understood them.
“It’s the unerring and infallible word of God, for Chrissake.”
Oh, I always thought that it was a randomly documented collection of ancient oral culture.
(that people willfully misunderstand) So that would make the readers pretentious, not the actual work. So yes, sometimes the Bible does “quote” the voice of god, but so does the Iliad.
@#21 Spinioza —
I think the internal logic of people’s use of pretentious for things they don’t like (and often don’t understand) goes something like this:
1. I don’t like and/or understand it.
2. Therefore, it’s unimportant.
3. Therefore, anyone who does profess to like or understand it is attaching exaggerated importance to an unimportant thing, and is thus being pretentious.
The real problem is the jump from one to two…correct that, and the rest of their flimsy excuse for an insult (“pretentious”) falls apart.
The criterion for the list was “books that people bought without reading, but didn’t get rid of”. “Pretentious” was an interpretation, but not a very good one. “Aspirational” might be better.
Some of it is just obsolete taste. Dickens is less popular than he was, but he’s not really highbrow or deep. If you don’t think he’s fun, don’t read him.
Some people just don’t like novels but think that should read them. A relic of education.
Pretentious? I’d call at least half of that list light entertainment. Neil Gaiman must be very pretentious with three books on the list.
Hmm… going to go re-read Sandman now, pretentious or not.
@#25 mahada —
To be fair, it’s only PZ who says that this is a list of “so-called pretentious books”. In the original meme, they’re just called “Books of Pretension”, a title that may be trying to make the claim that the readers of these books, not the books themselves, are pretentious.
Ooooh PZ! You haven’t read “Poisonwood Bible”? I highly suggest it! I’m a Kingsolver fan, and that book caused me to be so. I think you’d rather enjoy it. It does not look favorably upon the intense missionary father figure in the book… quite the contrary.
Jeez, I’ve finished 40 of those books. It’d be 41, but I somehow never manage to make it more than halfway though Middlemarch – I put it down and then lose my place, and can’t screw up enough energy to start over again for a year or two.
Also,
If you can’t appreciate Candide, you have no sense of humor and are a falure as a human. If you can’t appreciate the Critique of Pure Reason, you just can’t keep sentences longer than a page in you head at one time. If you CAN appreciate either Being and Time or Thus Spoke Zarathrustra, you’re mentally ill.
Does it count if you’ve seen the movie?
How I love a canon. Wasn’t this one somehow produced by My Library Thing or whatever it’s called. I haven’t sussed the details. Anyone know what’s in the canon selected by ‘Literature for Dummies’?
Hey PZ, I’m with Kcanadensis @30 in recommending the Poisonwood Bible to you.
Also, looking at your hit-rate of 77/106, I have to say I’m quite impressed. I wonder if scientists in general persist more strongly with books considered ‘less than popularly accessible’.
But looking at that list, I don’t think that’s fair; aside from ‘The Silmarillion’, nearly every book I have picked up on that list has been brilliant.
Nearly.
I am led to wonder: how does ‘Angels & Demons’ qualify as pretentious? Isn’t Dan Brown a complete and utter hack?
Why so many books by the same authors? Very strange. What about non-Greek mythology like the Kalavala or Japanese folk tales? Gotta be pretentious too.
OK, I’m pretentious. I love Garcia-Marquez. The opening paragraph from “Love in the Time of Cholera” is still one of my favorite passages. It makes me wish I could read Spanish.
@#34 silentsanta —
Actually, the more I think about it, A & D may actually be one of the few books on that list that genuinely qualifies as “pretentious.”
To repeat the definition of pretentious given in the OED:
Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed; making an exaggerated outward display; ostentatious, showy.
At the beginning of A & D, Dan Brown claims that plot elements are based on actual fact, and even thanks research institutes like CERN, when in reality the book is riddled with factual errors and is utter fiction (and rather silly fiction at that). Other people in popular culture take it and its sequel, The Da Vinci Code, seriously. Thus, I think A & D is actually a prime example of true pretension in popular culture — an “attempt to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed” that has had at least some limited success.
The criterion for the list was “books that people bought without reading, but didn’t get rid of”. “Pretentious” was an interpretation, but not a very good one. “Aspirational” might be better.
———–
an “attempt to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed”.
———–
this is where the idea of the list as “pretentious” comes in. It’s assumed those book sit on the shelf, unread, as signifiers of taste. Not that they haven’t been read because someone didn’t get around to it, but that they’re for show in the first place.
@#38 MAJeff —
But then isn’t is really saying that the people who list them are pretentious — not the books themselves? I think the distinction between something being pretentious in and of itself and a person using something to pretentious ends often gets lost, and that’s unfortunate.
Anybody who thinks the Bible isn’t pretentious hasn’t read it.
@1: Dune? Well-written? You must not have actually read the dreck, then.
My list of overrated schlock certainly includes Dick, Herbert, Heinlein, Asimov, Lovecraft, and the like.
There’s this culture of unexamined idol-worship around them, and most of their appeal is the accumulated respect of age.
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is pretentious?? You’ve got to be kidding me. But, I guess the nice thing about books is that people have their own tastes about them. I read Love in the Time of Cholera and hated it all. I got to the end and though “Florentino’s a creepy idiot, and Fermina’s not worth it.” Bah. But Poisonwood Bible is quite possibly my favorite book ever. I wouldn’t call either one pretentious, though.
…[hit post too soon]
Or the people who read them pretentious, either. The most pretentious one I can think of, where the book, author, and people who reveled in having read it all seem pretentious to me, isn’t on the list. (House of Leaves. Sorry if you liked it and aren’t pretentious.)
I’m disappointed. I think we need to maintain higher standards for aspiring pretentious intellectuals.
They should be reading The Sheltering Sky, Invitation to a Beheading, The Bell Jar, Discipline and Punish, As I Lay Dying, The Tale of Genji, The Trial, À la recherche du temps perdu (for added pretentiousness points, give the title in French), The Tin Drum, Death in Venice, Billiards at Half Past Nine, The Leopard, The Delta of Venus, etc.
If we don’t uphold the highest standards of pretentiousness, then what use is being pretentious?
The suggestion that books by Rand are pretentious is totally ridiculous. A “pretentious” book is one that somebody carries around to impress literary types. But literary types hate Rand, and anybody trying to impress them would be trying in vain. There was even a piece in the NYT a few weeks ago about this.
Of course, there are some of us who think that the literary types are missing out. We like our Rand as a personal private pleasure, and we don’t care what other people think about it. Some of us who are in academia even have to keep our admiration on the down low.
So, I think one of your assumptions is wrong. I’m just not sure which.
I can think of few things more pretentious than the making of such a list.
@#45 NS —
This is I think the crux of the problem. The term “pretentious book” should logically refer to a book that “attempts to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed; makes an exaggerated outward display; [is] ostentatious, showy.” In this sense, many would regard Rand as being pretentious and would argue that her books affect greater importance or merit than they in fact possess.
However, generally when people refer to a “pretentious book” they are, as you said, actually describing the pretension of people who “carry [the book] around to impress literary types.” So in the popular usage a “pretentious book” isn’t actually a book that is pretentious per se; it’s a book that people use in a pretentious way.
If we were more clear about what we meant when we used the word “pretentious,” I think many disputes would be resolved, or wouldn’t happen at all.
The first book I ever abandoned was “Dr. Doolittle” when I was about in third grade. I eventually got around to reading it and finishing some of the followup stories as well. I’m not a quitter.
I think that the idea is that those who claim to have read the list are pretentious, but the Angels and Demons in the list really, really argues against that idea. Dan Brown is in the “Oh, my God, I’m a success! Let me stop writing, now!” league of JD Salinger and Harper Lee. I’ve read books by popular authors that are far better, yet appear to have been written in a few weeks.
Huh. I’ve read more than 1/3 of those books. I guess that guy would say I’m pretentious. Which bothers me not at all, but I *am* sort of boggled by the whole thing.
MKK
I can think of few things more pretentious than the making of such a list.
Well, it’s automatically generated from LibraryThing’s data of who is marking certain books in their collections as unread. The assumption is that an unread book is simply kept on the shelf to impress the neighbours, which is hardly a new tradition. One of the more amusing things I noticed when visiting the Huntington Library is that their own library was open to the public, and you could see shelf upon shelf of the “great books” and yet the only ones that were cut, for the most part, were the penny dreadfuls.
Nevertheless, I think that this list misses. I think the reason that Angels and Demons remains on people’s unread list is that they’ve heard the buzz, bought it, and can’t work up the enthusiasm to tackle that piece of crap. I can’t blame them, as I’m exactly the same (except for the bit about having bought the book).
Please, do not think that I am comparing Angels and Demons with either Catcher in the Rye or To Kill a Mockingbird for literary merit. Dan Brown is the literary equivalent of Christopher Cross.
Dan Brown is in the “Oh, my God, I’m a success! Let me stop writing, now!” league of JD Salinger and Harper Lee.
As long as he means it literally, I wish him happiness–long, long decades of happiness–in that league. ;-)
Somewhat OT, but the conversation about Dan Brown brought this to mind for some reason:
Has anyone here attempted to read any books from the Left Behind series? If you get masochistic pleasure from reading fundamentalist idiocy, nothing could possibly beat these books, whose ideas and writing style make Dan Brown look like a literary genius.
As Etha, Nullfie and MAJeff observe, it’s “Books of Pretension,” which PZ distorts into “Pretentious Books”: i.e. it’s books that Pretentious People buy to impress others (or themselves) and then display on their shelves unread. The linked bloggers aren’t criticizing the books or people who actually read them, although the blog posts will naturally attract people who want to denounce or praise the books themselves.
To Hoosier X:
I still maintain that the Bible is no more pretentious than the Iliad, and to call ancient texts “pretentious” is anachronistic – in that it superimposes *our* cultural values onto a past society, for which these texts were originally composed.
I certainly haven’t read *all* of the Bible, but I’ve read a lot of it. The Book of Mormon, however, is pretentiousness by definition, because it purports to be ancient, but is not.
But of course, Etha is right, if we’re talking about the *use* of the text, then that’s different. I’ve been taking this as, the book was composed with pretentiousness, not its later use.
This reminds me of an old party game in which you name a book you HAVE NOT read and get a point for each other person present who HAS read it. David Lodge described it in one of his academic satires.
It is a surprisingly interesting game. You seriously want to expose the holes in your own reading. If no one has read the book, even if it is “canonical”, you won’t get any points.
Can someone turn this into a web meme? So many of them remind me of the old party games.
Nullifidian: Given that The Tale of Genji is basically the first novel ever, it’s really just tremendously archaic, not pretentious. Also, The Trial is no more pretentious than 1984.
NS: The suggestion that books by Rand are pretentious is totally ridiculous.
I have to agree. Barkingly unhinged, sociopathically callous, sexually bizarre: sure. Pretentious: not so much.
so this is really about books people want to read, but don’t?
That’s not pretentiousness! That’s just like any other hobby that falls by the wayside sometimes.
oy. I’m spent.
@#56 Kaleberg —
I have an even better idea: can someone turn this into a drinking game? I think that would be oddly hilarious.
Well, it’s automatically generated from LibraryThing’s data of who is marking certain books in their collections as unread.
Sorry, I was unclear due to nausea. The playing of this game is very pretentious.
Sophist FCD:
wouldn’t the first novel ever be the Satyricon?
I agree about Rand.
Sophist FCD (or others) —
What does “FCD” stand for? Internally, I read it as “First Church of Darwin,” but my only basis for this interpretation is my own bizarre sense of acronym humor…I’m curious what it really is.
These books are just those that are most commonly tagged at Librarything as “unread”. I expect to make this list, a book has to first be popular enough to be listed often and tagged, which is why there aren’t any truly obscure books of the kind an academic might think of as pretentious. And then, once a book is bought and cataloged, there may be any number of reasons why it goes unread — pretension being just one of them.
The Friends of Charles Darwin
http://darwin.gruts.com/
Carlie @43
“House of Leaves” is one of my favourite books! The author is fully aware of pretentious wankery, and I felt he displays a charming adeptness at using it as a device in his book, internally and externally. I thought it was exciting to see an author take the essence of charlatanism and self-congratulatory bullshit, and somehow construct something beautiful out of it: Within those pages is the only space where someone could conceivably of can quote a moron like Lacan and actually be saying something useful.
If that does not count as a triumph, I can’t imagine what is :)
I think the idea of a “pretentious book” isn’t that the content or the author of the book is pretentious, but that the pretension lies in the idea that this book MUST be read for one to be credited as a well-read reader.
On another level, it’s pretentious to credit one’s self with a lack of pretension by virtue of one’s propensity for leaving books unread.
In the end you only need to read one book:
http://www.amazon.com/Talk-About-Books-Havent-Read/dp/1596914696
Oh, this list is angering up the blood! Slap my ass and call me an elitist (a badge I wear proudly, by the way)…
I couldn’t put The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay down.
Great Expectations? Pretentious? How about “Greatest novel ever written!”
Jeez, you know, I can’t go on…gotta calm down first…
Whoever devised this list better stick to reviewing Dick and Jane, or is that too hoigty-toity?
The three most pretentious books I can think of are (in order of pretentiousness):
1) James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake
2) Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
3) G.W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind
OK, I’m pretentious. I love Garcia-Marquez. The opening paragraph from “Love in the Time of Cholera” is still one of my favorite passages. It makes me wish I could read Spanish.
I’m so pretentious that I am actually in the process of reading that book in Spanish. “Era inevitable: el olor de las alemandras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados.”
I also agree with those who have commented on Dan Brown. I have a copy of the Da Vinci Code, which was a present from friends, but nothing would bring me to purchase a copy of a book written by that hand. He writes some of the worst prose it has been my displeasure to encounter.
How about this for the plot for his next book: Robert Langdon discovers the skeleton of a rabbit in the jaws of a velociraptor and has to escape from the evil Big Scientists who try to kill him before he can reveal his find to the world! :)
That most of the books on that list should lie unread on shelves is a crying shame.
“Quicksilver”?!? “Gravity’s Rainbow”?!? Those *are* books of my particular bible. Old testament = Pynchon. New testament = Stephenson.
Re: Dune, I thought it was pretentious the first three times I couldn’t get past the first 20 pages, but after I finally got past that it was great. Besides, it gave us Duncan Idaho – the Kenny McCormick of Arrakis.
I’m a bit disheartened to realise I’ve only read about 25 off the list. In my defence I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years reading geomorphology, climatology and law textbooks and they’re like, really really big some of them and they can take a really really long time to read. And they have big words and stuff….and no pretty pictures.
Seriously though for the next year until the PhD is over novels wlil have to remain on the backburner. For the moment my days are spent either at work or looking after 3 kids under the age of the 3 and my nights are spent studying, catching up on housework and hanging around on this blog reading you clowns. (Notice Mr Shrek doesn’t get a mention- poor big ugly ogre just has to look after himself).
Sorry, I didn’t bother reading any of these comments.
I was reminded of the Woody Allen story, which I believe was called “The Shallowest Man in the World.”
It could be re-titled with the superlative as “Most Pretentious” and illustrate the same point.
Unrelated moral: Do not join a mafia wives reading circle, for you will learn nothing.
defectiverobot-
I’ve come to the conclusion that the list is a list of generally good, sometimes great, books that are often purchased but rarely read, the books that anyone with pretensions of being well-read would own (except, glaringly, Dan Brown, but enough of him). The books on the list are good, sometimes difficult, but almost all worthwhile, even if dated. I have to agree with ShemAndShaun that it is a shame that people have not read them (Rand, Mr. Greenspan should note, being one that you should be embarrassed to enjoy once you are old enough to have graduated from college).
It may not be the modern Great Books canon, but it’s not a bad start for any library.
Guns, Germs and Steel is pretentious? Maybe the person who wrote the list didn’t like the fact that Diamond’s book says that European only succeeded because of those things and NOT because they were smarter or better in some way than those they conquered. Maybe his poor little Euro-centric feelings got hurt.
I think a lot of you are misunderstanding what this list is; it’s a list of books that many people report not finishing, that’s all. “Pretentious” is not Lynch’s term, and it’s clearly ironic.
#74 Now, now Amy. Don’t let the xenophobia shine through too much.
Had you read the other comments you would have noted that the list is not “compiled”. Apparently it is generated from the database of LibraryThing as the books that most people have on the shelves, but have not read.
What your little rant against us Europeans was for, when the majority of the books on the list were by European authors, is beyond me. I guess you liked that book.
European-bashing and European-exhaulting are favorite European traditions. I applaud and condemn them both!
I guess the idea that we exported all of our creation scientists to your shores many moons ago still smarts.
You know what’s pretentious? This fucking list.
Either that, or pretentiousness is a value I’m going to start championing.
Etha, if you want to cleanse your mind from the evil of the LaJenkins writing combination, try reading Left Behind Fridays at the Slacktivist. Fred reviews a chapter a week, and it’s a thing of beauty to behold. I think he’s been at it over a year and a half and isn’t quite done with the first book yet.
Ok, silentsanta, if Danielewski was being pretentious on purpose, that might make it kind of ok. A little. ;)
Kaleberg – but wouldn’t that game be completely undermined by the fact that everyone can just lie and say they hadn’t read it either? I guess it would be the battle between trying to win the game and not trying to look like you’ve never read anything. The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Instead of listing which books on the list you’ve read, I think it would be more useful to list which of the books you own but haven’t read.
I bought Mansfield Park last year, and I haven’t read it yet. But I plan to start it after I finish the Ho Chi Minh biography.
I still say the Bible is pretentious. Just start reading Psalms and see how far you get before you want to tell the writer to get over himself.
As for the Iliad-Bible comparisons, read the beginning of the Gospels and then compare them to the opening lines of the Iliad. One is pure propaganda. The other is … poetry!
@#80 Carlie —
Thanks for the Left Behind Fridays link. It’s incredibly hilarious. Though 20 pages of amusing commentary on Left Behind…I’ll be shocked if I accomplish anything at all this weekend. Oh well. I guess that’s why they call it slacktivism.
OK, full disclosure:
I actually liked the Dan Brown novels and the Left Behind series.
Now wait! Before you all go dragging me to the iron maiden, let me clarify that I enjoyed them for what they were, breezy, hilariously pulpy trash. There’s nothing wrong with breezy pulp trash from time to time (unless it’s James Patterson, that guy is just insultingly bad). Sometimes it’s fun to hang your brain on the hat rack for a while and just sit back and read the literary equivalent of mac and cheese. It makes you appreciate the other stuff so much more…! (And seriously, after slogging through Tristram Shandy for my lit masters, brainlessness was a welcome respite!)
Etha, it’s totally worth it. The only bad thing about it is the way it’s archived you have to start at the bottom and work up the page. Oh, rats. I just checked, forgetting about the new typepad horror of pagination. That makes it worse. But for a review set that starts off the whole thing saying Rayford Steele is totally a porn star name, who could resist? If you use the search box for “Left Behind” or “LB”, you get a google result that you can go straight to the end for and work back.
There is also Right Behind, the fanwankery respinning of the plot as if real people were involved instead of cardboard caricatures.
Um…am I forgiven if I add that I just burned through all three His Dark Materials books in a row and loved them? The third was a little long in the tooth, but man, what an awesome premise…
Pretentious
1) Marked by an unwarranted claim to importance or distinction
2) Ostentatious; intended to impress others
I can some of these books definitely being overrated. Certainly the work of Charles Dickens is tremendously overstated, The Silmarillion is far more a textbook than novel, Ayn Rand is the definition of false depth, and some works such as Vanity Fair or Mansfield Park are significant more for their history than their actual content.
Many of these, though, are quite simply bizarre. Jane Austen’s books may resemble Danielle Steele novels, and the society they commented on may be far changed, but age is irrelevant to wit. Catch-22 fits together like a darkly beautiful 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle. And really, what the hell is Neil Gaiman doing on there? His work is complex, but they make breezy reads.
Then you have Angels and Devils. Pretentious? Dan Brown writes like R. L. Stine. Even fans of The De Vinci Code – not the most discerning lot – generally agree this book is rather crap.
Master Mahan @87:
Dan Brown writes like R. L. Stine.
So true.
I rather liked The Fountainhead. But when I found out there was a whole cult devoted to Rand’s philosophy, I thought, “WTF”? Are they trying to attract people who are too smart for Scientology … but not by much?
I can only assume that in calling Hawthorne “unpleasant,” you’ve done so without reading “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” The narrative centers around a tension between science and god, or at least objective research and spirituality.
@Carlie and Etha: To easily view all of Fred’s Left Behind posts from the very beginning, use Right Behind’s archive. That way you won’t have to deal with the evils of typepad’s new pagination system.
Also, for the record Fred has been doing his page by page review since 2003. Hard to believe, really.
Oh yeah, the topic: I’ve read 31 of those books. I guess I could stand a little more pretension
#27:
Those people scare the shit out of me, goddamed pod-people. If the point of the list is to mock *books-as-jewelry*, fine. But if the intent was to mock the books themselves, I endorse feeding the listmaker to the lions. In fact many of these books are part of my test for replicants. If you don’t *get* Nabokov, Swift, Dickens, Proust, and Joyce, just sit down and die already. Thank goodness Shakespeare wasn’t on the list, because I’d hate to have to call the Lit. Ninjas.
Not to impressive on my part. Only read 19 on the list. Still, as has been said, it is a stupid list. Guns, Germs and Steel? Yeah, whatever.
The three most pretentious books I can think of are (in order of pretentiousness):
1) James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake
2) Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason
3) G.W.F. Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind
Posted by: Mavaddat | April 26, 2008 6:37 PM
I think you have to be careful what you say about #2 on your list.
If you mean that there is a lot of pretension amongst shallow readers of it, then sure, we agree.
But regardless of the veracity and lasting appeal of Kant’s project of Transcendental Idealism, his Copernican Revolution was at the very least one of the most influential and important (not pretentious) moments in the history of philosophy.
The Logical Positivism of the early 20th century philosophers was, in large part, a reaction to Kant, and we are still reeling from the after-effects of the implosion of Positivism by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to this day…
So, is the book itself pretentious?… Possibly, in that Kant may have overestimated the success of the project.
But perhaps not.
I think that anyone who goes further than undergad with philosophy should know better than to write of Kant like that.
Whenever I encounter the word “pretentious” being thrown around as an insult, I am reminded of this.
I’ll just say this about Dostoyevsky: writing it was a crime, reading it is a punishment.
Maybe it was better in Russian, but when that book was forced on me in high school, I wished the man was still alive so I could beat him to death with it.
-jcr
If you don’t *get* Nabokov, Swift, Dickens, Proust, and Joyce, just sit down and die already
That’s quite a package deal you’re making there. Some of these authors are great, others are horrible.
-jcr
Hmm, we’ve all done this before: http://www.users.bigpond.com/russellblackford/voices.htm
I don’t think I’ve read anything that could possibly be on this list since that time. Must put aside a bit of time to do so.
Btw, I don’t think they are so much pretentious books as books that people often pretend to have read. We could doubtless think of many reasons, such as “Hey, Foo versus Snark is supposed to be the best fantasy novel since St. John the Unhinged published his Book of Revelation, so I’ll put it on my shelf and pretend to have read it. But actually it’s too long for me to ever get around to doing so.”
Ah, I now see that a couple of people had already made that point. Yes, you’re not pretentious if you wrote one of these books. You’re not pretentious for having read them (many of these are wonderful books, after all). You’re pretentious if you, um, affect a false familiarity with their contents by putting them on your shelves and not reading them.
The Count of Monte Cristo? The Name of the Rose? Cryptonomicon? Pretentious?! Those are all page turners!
Hey there, 44. Don’t knock the Tale of Genji, just because you couldn’t get through all 1400 pages of it! I mean, it’s an epic about a guy with a major Oedipus complex who wants to boink everything on legs…and generally manages to leave a nice note afterwards.
On the list, I’d include most anything in modern fiction, although I did love the poisonwood bible.
-Heartbraking Story of Staggering Genius or whatever that book by Dave Eggers is called.
-Kite runner and everything with a plot along the following lines (which pretty much sums up about half of the modern lit section).
1)Rich person and poor person grow up together and are friends.
2) Cataclysm happens where rich person ditches poor person or doesn’t intervene when something terrible happens to poor person.
3) Rich person lives life.
4) Poor person dies in miserable poverty and probably in a horrible way. Rich person feels terrible about how awful they were to poor person.
5) Didn’t we all learn a nice moral lesson here?
Thoughts on pretension:
http://jeanneshade.blogspot.com/2008/04/on-popular-use-of-word-pretentious.html
@#85 Carlie —
Speaking of cardboard caricatures: did you notice how at the beginning of each book, there were always lists of the characters, classified into “saved” “unsaved” and “undecided,” with brief little one-line descriptions that tell about as much as we ever learn about the characters? And it’s not like this is Tolstoy, where such a list might actually be necessary. It’s the frikkin’ Left Behind books….it’s really quite comical.
Did you ever see the movie? Real dreck, but mildly entertaining as well.
@#84 defectiverobot —
I did too, on some level (elsewhise, why would I have sat through three of them), but on another level, it really horrifies me that people are taking these things (Left Behind and, to a lesser extent, A & D/DaVinci Code) seriously. Have you ever looked at the online community for the left behind books? The people there make the creobots that occasional show up ’round here look like really reasonable, rational people.
As a friend reminds me periodically, “It’s only pretentious if you’re pretending.” I think the point is that most of these books are classics — or at least talked about — and pretending to have read classics or oft-discussed books is very, very pretentious. The amount of Russian literature on the list is a case in point — hardly anyone reads it, and everyone talks about it. Several of my favorite books are there, but all I got out of this list was a reminder of how many books I need to read.
Kaleberg #56:
Fixed that for ya ;)
That’s a great recommended reading list… well, most of it. I can’t stomach Dan Brown. But where is A Brief History of Time? I thought that was the book we were all meant to own-but-not-read to signify how intellectual we are. I rather liked it, too.
I must admit, I enjoy Ayn Rand. I think of her work as an opportunity for troll-bashing without the internet. I particularly enjoy the protagonists who are reviled by a society which cannot understand their greatness, the idea that generosity is a sin, and the use of gold as currency because it has ‘inherent value’.
I am truly horrified. I’ve read 88 books on the list, and worse yet have read most of the books suggested in the comments.
I’m not sure I can claim finnegan’s wake, since I’ve only heard it and not read it (definitely the best way for that one).
I obviously need to get out more
I just read Brief History, simply for that reason: it’s a book many people bought but few read. Some of it was a slog as I have virtually no science background, but I found most of it quite within my conceptual grasp. I read it, put it on my bookshelf, people can see it: is that pretentious?
Why do they force stuff like that on teenagers? Christ. I skipped virtually every book I was assigned in high school, preferring my Stephen King, Clive Barker and H.P. Lovecraft. Glad I wasn’t forced to read Dostoevsky then; I read quite a lot of his stuff in my 20s and I loved it. Didn’t realize it would be so violently intense; some of his stuff’s the literary equivalent of Taxi Driver.
My brother actually dumped a girl because, after he gave her a copy of Watership Down, she complained (Spoiler Warning):
“that book… it’s about rabbits?”
“Dune”, enjoyable but pretty pretentious (I hate that “Chosen One” crap)- it did inspire National Lampoon’s “Doon”: “fun is the timekiller…”
“Moby Dick”, loved it, knew something kinky was afoot when I encountered an alliterative paragraph, glad I wasn’t force to read it in high school. Garcia-Marquez, sublime.
I am shocked nothing by Gene Wolfe made the list, although I do love his work.
@#96 John C. Randolph —
Which translation was forced on you? If it was the Constance Garnett, I understand completely. I don’t think anyone could have managed to destroy the original quality of Dostoevsky’s language as utterly as she did. It’s actually quite horrifying. Her Brother’s Karamazov is the worst (I seem to recall an entire paragraph where not only the stylistic quality but also the actual semantic meaning was lost in her translation), but she did a really awful job with all of them.
If you’re interested in giving Dostoevsky another chance (and, as 110 pointed out, it may seem better to you now than it did in HS), I cannot recommend the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky joint translations enough. Those two do a lovely job with Dostoevsky (and also with the other Russian authors they’ve translated).
((Full disclosure: Russian lit in general, and Dostoevsky in particular, is one of my favorite things in the world, so…biased a bit.))
I’m in the middle of the Garnett translation of The Brothers Karamazov. It’s… ponderous. I’m not reading it for school, though, so I’m free to switch to another translation at will. Seeing as how I’m avoiding it (during a time when I’m desperately seeking distractions from what I’m actually supposed to be doing, lol), it could be that a switch is warranted. Вы говарите по-русски, Этха?
@#113 Ксения —
С словарем, я могу по-русски читать и поинмать, но я говарю (и пишу) по-руский очень плохо.
Switching to English (because that took me far more time to write than is warranted for a single simple sentence), I definitely suggest switching — This is my favored translation. I tried to make it through the Garnett translation multiple times with no success….
Ya ponimaiu; ya tozha govoriu ne ochen horosho. :-/
But you’re making me feel better (or, not so badly anyway) about repeatedly stalling on the Garnett version! I’d love to read it in in original, but I’m afraid I’m not ready for that. I’m trying to teach myself… not the best way to go. I should have taken classes, but I’ve had other priorities, as they say. Sigh.
Given that The Tale of Genji is basically the first novel ever, it’s really just tremendously archaic, not pretentious.
Sophist, I wasn’t claiming that any of the books on my list were pretentious, but merely that they were the sort of things that pretentious intellectuals would want to say that they’ve read. Actually, I’ve read the books on the list in whole or in part (I haven’t finished the entire Proust series), and enjoyed most of them, although I could take or leave The Bell Jar. Some of them made a very strong impression on me, like The Sheltering Sky and Death in Venice, which I first read when I was fourteen. I started it at eleven at night and I stayed up late to finish it in one sitting.
A lot of pretentious intellectuals that I know (unfortunately for me) have a very Orientalist approach to their reading. They like to read Asian tales, but with no depth of appreciation of the culture, just to say that they’ve read it, and The Tale of Genji is a must-read in those circles. Their approach to Asian culture and tradition is about equivalent to a vacationer who wants to capture his experience of the region as a series of snaps of an ‘exotic’ locale. Actually this recognition of the way Westerners’ superficial approach to non-Western cultures shapes their experience is one of the things that makes The Sheltering Sky resonate so much with me.
Also, The Trial is no more pretentious than 1984.
Bad choice for an illustration, I’m afraid, because I regard 1984 as very pretentious in the worst sense of the word. I think that 1984 is a fundamentally shallow book which pretends to a depth of ideas that it doesn’t actually possess. Of dystopian literature, I vastly prefer Brave New World (or even The Handmaid’s Tale and Never Let Me Go) on the principle that I already disliked Stalinism without needing to be beaten over the head with it.
The Trial, on the other hand, is a much better work that I’ve loved since high school that is rich in symbolism and the play of ideas, but for those reasons make it a prime subject for the kind of pretentious treatment that dogs any work which can be read from a variety of viewpoints.
@#115 Ксюша —
TBH, I’ve only read parts of Dostoevsky in the original Russian, because it takes me about 10 times longer to read in Russian as it does in English. I’ve read the beginning of Brothers K and a lot of Notes from the Underground in Russian…not much else. I wish they had one of those parallel translations available…with Russian on the left pages and English on the right. That would be so cool….
The entire reason I learned Russian was to read Dostoevsky. I developed an obsession with him in HS, so my first year in college I took a reading-oriented course in Russian. And yet, since then I haven’t managed to finish even one of his shorter books in Russian. I disappoint myself frequently…
((Good luck with the teaching-yourself-Russian thing, btw. I tried several times…and failed. You’re doing better than I did.))
If you’re interested in giving Dostoevsky another chance (and, as 110 pointed out, it may seem better to you now than it did in HS), I cannot recommend the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky joint translations enough. Those two do a lovely job with Dostoevsky (and also with the other Russian authors they’ve translated).
((Full disclosure: Russian lit in general, and Dostoevsky in particular, is one of my favorite things in the world, so…biased a bit.))
Do you of a decent translator of Turgenev? I have an impossibly ancient edition of Fathers and Sons purchased at a used book store which I cannot bring myself to reread. I looked at Pevear’s Wiki page, and the list of translations he’s done with Volokhonsky didn’t include any Turgenev.
Anything by Al the Liar Franken belongs on this list.
Yes, you’re right! That goes for any other book you haven’t read, but keep on your bookshelf to impress us hot’n’brainy chicks. How’s that workin’ out for ya?
@#118 Nullifidian —
It’s been a while, but I read the Norton Critical Edition version, and found the translation (by Michael Katz) quite readable. In addition, the NCE includes a lot of critical essays and historical background on the text, which is always good to have and is particularly useful in the case of Fathers and Sons, since this novel was a response to a very historically specific movement in Russian thought (the transition from the liberalism of the early 19th century Russian intelligentsia — “fathers” — to the nihilism of the mid/late 19th century Russian intelligentsia — “sons”).
Stogoe:
Because you don’t like SF? In that case :P
If it’s because you’re ok with SF but not these particular authors carry on then…
Real pretension involves feeling superior to people who enjoy Dan Brown.
What? But I am superior to people who enjoy Dan Brown!
Last year the good book store in my city had a “books by the kilo” sale (oh joyous day!) and I picked up some of the Russian classics I felt I should have read, odd bits of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky. Didn’t think much of Tolstoy or Chekhov (perhaps because I don’t have enough background to fully appreciate them), but I quite enjoyed Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Umm… Not that I managed to finish it though. I got up to the bit where the Prince was chasing around after the self-loathing airhead bimbo, and then found I didn’t actually like any of the characters any more.
Lately my forays into Russian literature are limited to some casual Sergey Lukyanenko… perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned that while we’re being pretentious ;)
I read quite a lot of his stuff in my 20s and I loved it. Didn’t realize it would be so violently intense; some of his stuff’s the literary equivalent of Taxi Driver.
That goes for any other book you haven’t read, but keep on your bookshelf to impress us hot’n’brainy chicks. How’s that workin’ out for ya?