"We’ve taken a blushing look back at some of the formerly hip tomes now shelved in that spectral section of the bookshop reserved for the irredeemably dated, the hopelessly irrelevant, the plain offensive. Their fate tells us a little something not only about why cult novels fade but also about how they’re made in the first place.
If there’s one lesson to be learned, it’s this: stay sceptical, dear reader. Don’t, for instance, rush to empty your home of anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’ at the behest of a book that may yet turn out to be our own era’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. (Then again, if you do still have a copy of that particular avian-inspired title lurking in your bookcase, now might be a good time to pay a visit to the charity shop.)"I'm always up for a good hate-on against classics, and I agree with some of this list while a few selections just fly over my head (nobody, including ultra-leftists I knew in graduate school, has ever recommended that I actually read Mao's Little Red Book).
Also, while some of these are pernicious examples of Dead White Male Worship in action, a few are harmless moments of books that are very much "of their times," i.e., dispensable. I know my mom and dad owned a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and I never read it. I'm not sure if they did either, but it seems like something you had to own in the 1970's.
The Catcher In The Rye? A perfect example of a book we assign to high school freshmen due to a lack of imagination. There are so many better coming-of-age stories out there that don't focus on neurotic teen New Yorkers, that have a broader appeal than smoking cigarettes and hitting on grown women. Not an awful novel, but certainly not a necessary one.
The Old Man and the Sea? I like it! I like Hemingway, drunken Sloppy Joe excesses and all! But how about the Nick Adams short stories instead, given the context of impending climate disaster?
Atlas Shrugged? Nobody reads this shit except for Republican congressman, right? I desperately hope so. I mean, just a single page is headache-inducing. Rand hate-wrote for conservatives wanting to hate-read about how poor people deserve it, good and hard. I guess you could argue it's worth a read, if only to plumb the necrotizing pathologies of Republicanism / Trumpism. But just a few pages will do, thank you.
The Beach? Again, I graduated from college the year this came out, and I've been to Thailand about four times in my life, and I like secluded beaches. I have never come across this book, or have had it recommended to me. (The movie is easily Danny Boyle's worst, and I've sat through Sunshine!)
Iron John? Robert Bly was already a joke by the time I was in college in the early 90s. Nobody under 45 took him or it seriously at the time. I'm 45 now, and have still never felt any compulsion to read Robert Bly.
On The Road? Read it in college. Remember kind of liking it, but also couldn't tell you much about it now as opposed to say, The Handmaid's Tale.
The Rules? Well, now we're just cheating. Like Seagull, no serious student of literature takes self-help type books seriously.
Infinite Jest? Started it a few times. I really like some of DFW's essays. He gave his most famous speech at my college, even (I wasn't there at the time). Given world enough and time, maybe I'll get through this some day but again, and I think this is my larger point, there are just so many other books out there that I haven't gotten to yet.
(The wife-abuse stuff doesn't exactly fuel my interest either.)
Canons are fine. Canons are actually worthwhile. Measuring works of literature against one another is a healthy exercise.
But canons need to reflect culture too, not just set benchmarks that are, indeed, historically informed by racist and sexist ideas of artistic value.
Literature is more of a complicated fabric or pattern being established over decades and centuries, less a sprint through the ostensible "Greatest Hits."
So lists like this are harmless. And by harmless I mean fully dispensable as well.
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