ITT: Books that people read just to feel smart -

[nigger of the north]

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.

I've been through pretty much all the classics, English and otherwise. I always felt Tolstoy's short stories were his strongest work, despite the praise for his novels. That said, I tried to get through War and Peace about 5 years back, just to say I'd finished it.

I did not. Got about 900 pages in before I dumped it. Re- my previous post on uniform translation on the Russian novels above, the longer works are practically unreadable in English for anything other than extreme partisans. The Russian name phenomenon adds an additional layer of difficulty, and despite intense concentration, you still have no idea who is who after a few hundred pages.

 

[neverendingmidi]

Would these be considered stuff like a coffee table books? The stuff you leave out so people can see you’re reading it?

I’d definitely put “An Inconvenient Truth” on that list. 99% of the racial grievance books that have come out, 100% of said genre that have been published in the last year.

 

[The Curmudgeon]

"A People's History of America" is one I've witnessed people using to feel smart. Give a already pretentious liberal college kid or burnt out middle-aged activist this book and they suddenly think they know everything about the United States. If it's been mentioned already, then sorry for being redundant.

 

[Jarolleon]

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

To be fair, you can't really brag about reading Cotton Mather because most people, if they know of him at all, remember him as "That Salem Witch Trial guy" . Or is that the normie equivalent of 4chan edgelords who read Evola because it's a "secret redpill" or something?

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

Anything written by Thomas Paine or John Locke, does anyone remember when sergon of applebees was sperging on those two?

 

[FUTUREMAN]

Blindsight by Peter Watts.
Everyone talks abt how freaky it is, and yeah it is freaky but not THAT much. The hyper-autist mindfucker vampires really killed it for me. B/c for being a creature that's just a weird cousin of humanity, the book seems to always portray'em as a generic space monster. Also, sociopaths apparently lack consciousness.
Also also:
Joe: "Why don't we bring back our ancient predators and put them in charge of everything since they're so smart?"
The board: "fuckin genius! How abt you get a promotion son?"
I also don't need to pick up a dictionary half the time either. "Fourier transforms appeared" nigga just say "radio signals were picked up"!