Show Library: Pseudointellectual Books That, in Fact, Suck

[gumpzilla]

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wow thats like suuuuuuuper nitty.

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You ain't seen nothing yet!

[mlagoo]

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wow thats like suuuuuuuper nitty

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lol go back to grammar school idiot

[miajag]

You spelled "super" wrong too.

[sam h]

Everything by Herman Hesse
Everything by John Steinbeck
Everything by Isabel Allende
90% of Remembrance of Things Past
The Magic Mountain
For Whom the Bell Tolls
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

[guids]

I dislike most everytyhing in this thread, Freakanomics though, i wouldnt really put in here though becasue I dont think its pseudointellectual, I thought it was geared more towards the everyone? The only author I really disagree with is Edgar Allen Poe, he is one fo my favorite authors.

[amplify]

Fight Club and Poe are Pseudo-intellectual? Ha. Poe really does suck though, I have no idea how he got to be so popular, his poems are atrocious.

Things that actually are:

Kant may be a genius but he is unreadable
Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose was ok)
The Elegant Universe - sucks, unreadable, probably because the underlying theory is nonsense
The Seven Storey Mountain - Ugh
Noam Chomsky's Political Books - Double Ugh
DH Lawrence - sucky

[Boris]

OK time to set the record straight. I have impeccable taste in literature.

Ayn Rand - Above average. Not nearly as bad as you clowns claim.

Crime and Punishment - Great Book! Easy to read yet complex!

Steinbeck - Slightly over rated but still pretty darn good.

Tom Robbins - How on earth can he be mentioned in a thread about pseudo-intellectual books? He is a fun happy writer.

Joseph Heller - Catch-22 might be over rated by some, but if you don't like this book you probably suck. The only other book of Heller's I tried to read was Something Happened. It sucks.

Herman Hesse - Again, if you don't like this guy you probably posses only middling intelligence.

[DrewDevil]

On Ayn Rand:

The Fountainhead is my favorite book of all time. It is a masterpiece from beginning to end and it created in me a sort of awesome reverence for Roark, who refused to compromise even one iota even in the face of starvation. I've read dozens of "thrillers" in my time and I've never been so utterly captivated by the suspense created by this book and its heroic protagonist.

Now...

I couldn't get through Atlas Shrugged. Talk about pseudo-intellectual claptrap, it was nothing but an endless spate of objectivist speeches thinly wrapped around a plot. Other than the first train ride, there was nothing exciting about this book, just a bunch of people standing around moralizing at cocktail parties. (I kept asking myself as I was trying to read another speech, "Ugh, is this going to be on the test?")

I think the difference is this: Rand wasn't a famous writer when the Fountainhead was published, and I'd be willing to bet that a really good editor did some substantial work on it before it was finished.

Then Rand was rich and famous when she wrote Atlas Shrugged. It took her 12 years to write and she refused to allow her publisher to change one single word of her manuscript. It was published exactly as she had written it in all of its bloated, overdone glory.

So read The Fountainhead and be inspired, and don't worry about trying to wade through Atlas Shrugged.

[amplify]

Boris is correct on all points above.

Also sucky, The Illiad and The Odyssey and The Aeneid. Nobody reads that crap, its rosy-fingered dawn garbage over and over.

[Boris]

Amp - nice call on Kant. He can suck it!