ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart

[AbsurdumRideo]

late and gay.

The Stranger - Albert Camus
The Pest - Albert Camus

War and Peace / that Russian dude
Any Shakespeare but forgetting it would be spoken in Old English and acted out as theatre ( lots of puns are gone awry )

And of course Hegel; Nietzsche and Kant.

 

[OutInTheRain]

The Stranger - Albert Camus

How dare you malign the first and greatest depiction of an autistic man in print.

The Stranger becomes a much better novel if you picture Mersault stimming the entire time and ignoring people to look at trains.

 

[George Lucas]

Finnegans Wake

 

[Pomniman]

Finnegans Wake

Not if you actually understand Joyce instead of taking Joseph Campbell's autism about the book at face value. You can't read things like "farty keks" and "pennies in the slutsmaschine" and not realize that he was taking the piss from start to finish. It's more about imagining the way all the silly shit he wrote in it sounds as a kind of nonverbal unlanguage than trying to "decipher" every word of it.

Basically taking it seriously is the exact wrong way to read it.

 

[Chicha Drinker]

Spicing from experience, Pablo Neruda is a good poet, but so many "literature buffs" love namedropping him, even if they don't even know spanish

 

[George Lucas]

Not if you actually understand Joyce instead of taking Joseph Campbell's autism about the book at face value. You can't read things like "farty keks" and "pennies in the slutsmaschine" and not realize that he was taking the piss from start to finish. It's more about imagining the way all the silly shit he wrote in it sounds as a kind of nonverbal unlanguage than trying to "decipher" every word of it.

Basically taking it seriously is the exact wrong way to read it.

First of all, nobody ‘actually understands Joyce’. The man was a polyglot and savant beyond anyone else. You can absolutely start to understand him. Nobody can fully understand him.

Secondly this isn’t a ‘bad books’ thread. The whole point of Finnegans Wake is to put the Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. The sort of twat who says they’ve read it and espouse how great it is has seldom gone beyond the first page.

So yes, people absolutely ‘read’ Finnegans Wake to feel smart, except they don’t actually read it.

 

[Pomniman]

First of all, nobody ‘actually understands Joyce’. The man was a polyglot and savant beyond anyone else. You can absolutely start to understand him. Nobody can fully understand him.

Secondly this isn’t a ‘bad books’ thread. The whole point of Finnegans Wake is to put the Dunning-Kruger effect on full display. The sort of twat who says they’ve read it and espouse how great it is has seldom gone beyond the first page.

So yes, people absolutely ‘read’ Finnegans Wake to feel smart, except they don’t actually read it.

He was a drunken Irish Jesuit cyclops who literally wrote letters about eating his wife's farts. The academic wankery around how many heccin' languages he knew misses the entire point of his oeuvre.

 

[George Lucas]

He was a drunken Irish Jesuit cyclops who literally wrote letters about eating his wife's farts. The academic wankery around how many heccin' languages he knew misses the entire point of his oeuvre.

Well I think we’re pretty much agreeing on the same point there; this sort of thing does take genius. It wasn’t until years later that people started pretending to like Finnegans Wake.