Show Library: Pseudointellectual Books That, in Fact, Suck

[Blarg]

MacBeth is awesome and I found it a very quick read.

[Nate.]

I'm not sure if he's still important in contemporary dialogue, but I found A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic to be arrogant and often without substance. I'm far from completely read in the literature of logical positivism, but the shreds I've come across have often suffered from similar defects.

--Nate

[edtost]

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Hi gang.

In this thread we will list, and probably argue about, various books that the tiresomely pretentious love to talk about, but which are either impossible reads or have no real intellectual value.

I'll open with: Levitt and Dubner's <u>Freakonomics,</u> one of the more lightweight reads of my 'serious reading' career, that goes to show why, hey, it is a bad idea to try to write an entire book without a thesis. Oh, hey, 'Lemonjello' looks bad on a resume, imagine that.

Rattle 'em off.

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Interesting. I found the thesis to be "It's valuable and important to analyze data from the real world, and we should be prepared to accept results that surprise us and counter our instinct."

I'm familiar with math, statistics, and some of the more shocking fringes of contemporary academia, and I was still engaged and enlightened by much of Freakonomics. Work that illuminates the nature of discrimination, gang organization, and educational fraud can be readable without being lightweight.

--Nate

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while the work highlighted in freakonomics was interesting, levitt's original papers were well-written and accessible enough to have been collected as a book on their own, without dumbing down everything and removing all the econometrics in an attempt to pander to a wider audience.

[Boris]

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On my hate list:

Ayn Rand
Joseph Conrad


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WRONGO!

Joseph Conrad is the nuts. Nostromo is his best work. It basically predicted the course of Latin American politics for the 20th century. Not to mention that it's a great read. The Secret Agent (Richard Reid's biography) and Lord Jim are also very good. People who hate on Conrad are usually too stupid to understand his greatness.

Ayn Rand's books are pretty good. Most of the hate for Rand is politically motivated.

[lippy]

Levitt explains that it is a book without a thesis, I thought?

[skunkworks]

I thought most of the hate for Rand is because of the whole cult of personality thing.

[Boris]

My nomination is Guns, Germs and Steel. Totally effed politically correct thesis about how societies evolve.

[Nate.]

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I thought The Great Gatsby kind of sucked, or was atleast overrated.

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I hesitate to quote from a work to defend it, because it will be easy for everyone to say "look, those two paragraphs are fluffy and didn't do anything for me." But Gatsby is one of my favorite novels and one of the most enduring and best-loved English-language novels, and I can't resist excerpting one of my favorite passages, when we first encounter Gatsby:

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Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor's mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.


I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn't call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

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[Blarg]

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On my hate list:

Ayn Rand
Joseph Conrad


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WRONGO!

Joseph Conrad is the nuts. Nostromo is his best work. It basically predicted the course of Latin American politics for the 20th century. Not to mention that it's a great read. The Secret Agent (Richard Reid's biography) and Lord Jim are also very good. People who hate on Conrad are usually too stupid to understand his greatness.

Ayn Rand's books are pretty good. Most of the hate for Rand is politically motivated.

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LOL.

I found Conrad incredibly dull and slow and sometimes morbidly symbolic.

ALL of the like for Rand is politically motivated. She's a classic venue for smarty-pants college kids to think they're really onto something, but juvenile to hold onto beyond that.

Are we even? [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[gamblore99]

I also didn't like freakonomics. Thought most of what was being analyzed was really boring (black people steal baby names from white people. Not so bad if its a one liner, but when you devote a quarter of your book to the subject it becomes very boring) I also questioned a lot of conclusions they drew from their data, didn't seem very scientific.