I read half of /lit/'s top 100

If you’re reading this then you already know about the list. It was a favorite between the ages of 24 and 29, but no longer. It specifies 102 distinct works and I have just finished reading 51 of them. This is a listicle of my takes. Come laugh at my ineptitude.

Yeah I got filtered, I fell for the meme, “you should just read what you enjoy” etc. I don’t care if I like reading classics, I need to have read them. Now that I’m through half of the list I have finally shaken my completionism disease. Maybe next I will exercise my mind by reading the books people show off on the subway.1

My sensibilities are utilitarian and ratlike. Flourishes, ambiguous musical prose whose interpretation is secondary to its sound, reading that stuff feel like wading through muddy pond water. I tell myself I read for insight and content.2 My rating scale is out of 5:

1. (Worst) Uninteresting, uninsightful, irrelevant. Maybe also stupid. Maybe it was relevant in the world it was published, but we are no longer in that world, in my opinion. Unworthy of being in a top 100 list, in my opinion.

2. I can appreciate that it has artistic or historical value but almost nothing in it is engaging.

3. Maybe one of the great books of our time. Maybe even enjoyable at parts.

4. An obvious classic and/or reading it was enjoyable.

5. (Best). A favorite.

The difference between 3 and 4 likely amount to my strength and attentiveness as a reader. We’ll go according to the list’s order, not my reading order. Spoilers relegated to the footnotes when I can help it.

3/5.

Everyone was reading it this summer so I hopped on the bandwagon and I’m glad to have done so. Amazing book. It is very difficult and dense with allegory. It is written in Mr Krabs voice. There are almost no women in this book but the feminine is everywhere. Diagrammatic descriptions of whaling ritual and process remind me of Mosaic sacrifice laws.

I found the extensive modern footnotes (that is, excluding Melville’s own) in the Norton Critical edition to be undermining, overwhelming and obtrusive.

4/5.

Dostoyevsky books are like extended religious parables. Really all but Demons and Notes from Underground seemed sickeningly, embarrassingly sentimental to me. Like that one guy said, “spilling Jesus all over the place.”

Something interesting just happened? Whoa, slow down. Extended cut to the shamelessly talkative bum that no one likes. This stock character appears in many of Dostoyevsky’s masterworks, often rambling about some misguided folk philosophy that’s thematically related to the book’s themes. I heard Dostoyevsky did this because he was a gambling addict getting paid by length.

In spite of this, the brief passages the books are remembered for are worth the slog. Smerdyakov is one of my favorite characters in literature. Contradicting all my complaints the epilogue is some of the most moving fiction I have ever read.

I read all of these in Pevear and Volokhonsky which was a mistake. The English is very awkward. The covers look cool, though.

5/5.

Nasty, sardonic. An obvious blackpill edgelord pick but good in spite of it. The ending is crazy. Nabokov is so much smarter than you it’s scary. One of the best to ever do it.

3/5.

Another thing about Dostoyevsky is that he never really sets into the action. The ball stops rolling often. People always have a foot out the door and are on the way to somewhere or are halfway-avoiding some conversation as it’s happening. The whole book is like this. Rodion Raskolnikov is constantly out at strange hours making his way in and out of restaurants in delirium.

Rodion is generally not a pleasant character to spend time with. He sulks around existentially and generally behaves horribly. Maybe this book is a good influence on boys who act like this, to nudge them to be less annoying.

Pevear and Volokhonsky strangely have people “twisting their mouth into a smile” or similar really often here. I wish I would have read another translation.

5/5.

Extremely difficult. Almost nothing happens. The scant parts I understood were beautiful. The narrator floats around the room. Joyce rendered people very subtly. Obviously a classic and one I would like to re-read someday.3

3/5.

I think this book is fading out of relevance. It was written pre-modern-internet and pre-9/11. Wallace’s Clean Party and Johnny Gentle are completely toothless in post-Trump world. A third of the book’s “Sierpinski gasket” is really dull, maybe for this reason. IDGAF about Marathe and Steeply. The Infinite Jest bro may soon go extinct. What book will the kids choose next?

There is a cool urban 90s mood here I have not felt from any other book. Parts of it are just a bunch of essays strung together. Some are horrible and a few are great. The AA speeches were great. The footnotes are basically part of the main body and should be read as they are referenced. The whoever sitting on the hospital bed describing depression was sophomoric, in my opinion. I can’t tell if this was intentional. I don’t know if the good parts are enough to save it.

I continue to try and unlearn my habit of aping David Foster Wallace’s writing voice. And but so, phrase-as-a-noun, etc.

3/5.

Edgy bro-lit. This one is a classic, I just can’t stand it lately. It is untouchably cool: who am I to criticize the cryptic, austere, Genesis-like prose. It fits so perfectly with the infernal, barren majesty of the southwest. Weird, pathetic lapses into Redditism4 knock me out of immersion. And I take it back, the prose is a little tryhard if I’m being honest. “Blood Meridian guy” has gone out of style alongside his craft IPAs. Maybe he’ll orbit back into being cool in a few years.

3/5.

During the final days of the pandemic, Biden held a do-not-board policy for COVID patients flying internationally into the US, I got trapped in London indefinitely because I couldn’t pass the NHS Boots PCR test. I posted up at the cheapest AirBNB I could find. In delirium I read the 2 books I had packed with me: a King James bible and this, Gravity’s Rainbow. During the days I couldn’t get out of bed I reread the book of Matthew a few times and then moved onto this. The juxtaposition of the two was pretty sickening. The cleaning lady next door kept playing Fake Plastic Trees on repeat through her cell phone speaker. Miraculously the ban was lifted 10 days in. I never managed to pass a PCR test.

This book is just stupidly hard. Pynchon goes out of his way to creatively inconvenience the reader. It breaks immersion. When he’s set about making a mess, slogging through this book feels like spending time with Pynchon instead of whatever is happening. I needed a guide to understand what was going on. Even with a guide you still have to re-read stuff very slowly to parse it. The first one that really broke me is the section where Katje is alone in the house with Osbie, narrated like a movie director. Parts are really funny. It is “overstuffed with goofs & gaffs.” Sometimes Pynchon tricks you by lapsing into conventionally beautiful, intelligible writing. These are the parts of Gravity’s Rainbow I see come up most often in conversation. There’s a lot in the book besides them.5

I feel a kind of hedonistic detachment from Pynchon’s voice. I can’t justify it or give any specific examples. I feel this way about a lot of things that came out of the 60s and 70s. Great book, I’ll return to it when I run out of other things to read.

What is there to say about this, really. Over a very long time I read the Penguin Classics King James Version with the Apocrypha cover-to-cover. It shaped my understanding of the English language. The commentary in this edition is informative and succinct.

1/5.

Really well crafted. I will read Augustus someday, maybe.

Sad boy bro lit. A softspoken kid in his early 20s will read this and think it is poignant and nod along to it saying “my diary desu.” William Stoner’s life is radically, embarrassingly successful by todays standards. He is completely passive and self-serving and wins at everything and still takes the posture of a victim. Stoner is tall and lanky. He abandons post at the dirt farm to pursue the arts because he’s got the music inside of him. Dad and mom don’t get it! Stoner gets a tenure track humanities faculty position. Oh so tall and lanky, and awkward, and academic is Stoner. Stoner’s enemies are short and deformed. Life and circumstance mistreats Stoner, woe is Stoner. His ball and chain wife grows to resent his mopey, listless, flat ass. Stoner looks academically out his office window in the dead of night. He fails the arrogant student because Literature is supposed to Mean Something! Stoner cheats on his bitch wife with a student and the affair is Beautiful. Stoner is sad because his career and the book he wrote do not leave enough of a mark on society. Stoner dies. Bbbbooooooo hhhhhhhhhhooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Stoner deserves worse than ever happened to him. I’m better than Stoner.

I have heard that there’s nuance here, that you’re actually supposed to intuit Stoner is bad and not empathize with him. In my world, the people reading this book just like Stoner and identify with him at face value and I have to bully them.

3/5.

Poor Mersault, his mom died. At last he will be free of those idiots. Are you really crazy if the world’s crazy? Makes you think…

Apparently it used to be a thing for bros to make this book their whole personality. It didn’t have much of an effect on me.

5/5.

Criticism of fictional literature is a comically pretentious medium. As soon as you read these stories you start noticing references to them everywhere. Every one in this collection has a Wikipedia article.

4/5. Really important.

I read Fagles. This is a wellspring of Redpill Truths, Masculinity Posture and BAPism. Tough to not read big swaths of this as homoerotic. At some point I came to visualize the text’s surreal hyper-glamorized violence as pudgy theater kids wrestling each other in a suburban mall parking lot.

My eyes gloss over the homogenous violence, I just don’t care. Can anyone really be assed to keep track of all the names and family trees in here? (Here’s where you get to shake your head in disbelief at my ignorance).

3/5.

Having read some Kafka’s shorts, Josef’s self assurance was surprising to me.

4/5.

I didn’t expect how uneven Shakespeare would be.

5/5.

I read this in Spanish. I was greatly disturbed by this depraved story. A lot in the book made me frown but the ending the most. I want nothing to do with any element of the Buendia spirit. We’ve all met people like these. Disgusting!!!

Magical realism is out of fashion, but I don’t find it to be a detractor here.

2/5.

This book has been so thoroughly processed by culture that you almost don’t need to read it. We live in post-1984 society. I was caught unpleasantly by surprise with the sex (romance???). It was really off-putting and bad.

I would rather have read Goldstein’s book than this one.

4/5.

Another edgy boy pick. I unfortunately spent too much of my 20s LARPing as Underground Man. My favorite of Dostoyevsky’s until I read Demons.

3/5.

Beautifully written. Joyce really puts you in another world. The girl always loved someone else, you’re just the life she’s stuck with. Also uh… Irish identity or whatever, ugh. Not really the stuff I needed while I was reading it. A book for winter.

1/5.

It’s time to take it off the lists. Wan, faded book. It’s just not compelling or interesting anymore. Boomer humor. A third of it is about war profiteering. Rails against systems that we’ve all grown tired of railing against. In sharp contrast to the typical boredom there are sporadic descriptions of the horror of war that are really effective and stomach-churning.

It’s like Gravity’s Rainbow without any interesting parts.

2/5.

Holden was so enormously privileged and autonomous. Was he molested? I think yes, unambiguously.

2/5.

A picture of a horrible, deteriorating racist family. The style is more interesting than anything that happens: most of it is a transcription of 3 extremely different peoples’ internal monologues. The writing is remarkable but the dreary, unrewarding subject makes me want to put the book down. There’s probably so much symbolism and structure in here that I missed.

Good riddance to this era. I don’t want to spend more time in it.

5/5.

He is a bug!!!!!

4/5.

Characteristically lifelike for Joyce. I learned too late to leave the footnotes for after the chapter or for a second reading.

2/5.

The worst of Dostoyevsky’s masterworks. All his worst attributes are on full display. There’s a million pages of filler. The stuff anyone remembers about this novel happen in the space of maybe 50 pages. The way he describes women is just not good. He always sidebars with a power rankings of, like, who is the hottest in the room (or “most distinctively physically alluring” or whatever).6

3/5.

A Discord moderator before his time. Uneven. Was Myrna the first Goth GF?

2/5.

Wow that kid is annoying.7 I wouldn’t let my kid read this for fear of him self-inserting into Siddhartha and becoming the most obnoxious person ever. A kid will probably read this and then think he is Steve Jobs.

2/5.

So joyless. What monstrosities we have wrought in this world. It became Apocalypse Now.

2/5.

True red flag if he likes this one. Really unsympathetic hero. I understand this is the author’s intention. Maybe in Japan the guy’s estrangement is naturally understood in context to be an allegory for, I don’t know, loss of tradition, or something. Here in the west I guarantee you it’s majority Car Seat Headrest listeners projecting onto the main guy to find new ways to accessorize their depression.8

3/5.

Ah, so this is the stuff Aldous Huxley was mulling on while everyone else was suffering through the Great Depression. Decadent beyond its intent. Soma and the world he painted is gross. The savage is unconvincing and not that admirable.

Better than 1984. In the two of these you can find the bones of every YA dystopia.

Characteristic of all short men in literature, Bernard Marx just fades into the background as soon as the people who matter take the stage.

1/5.

The writing is beautiful. You have to be a master to render people this believably.

I don’t mind it when there is no action or plot in Joyce’s modernist writing because there is sometimes joy in it. There is none in Woolfe. Everything is so … listless .. and … toilsome and etc. Part II was morose to the point of satire, really the whole thing was. When will anyone here have a good day. Real bedrotter energy here. I hate it!

2/5.

An easy read. I didn’t like it. IDGAF what Wikipedia says, this is not science fiction. Whether or not the aliens are real does it change anything important about this book?

Yet another case of short = annoying, funny, sad, pathetic, while tall = important, noble, matters. Had me googling “how tall is Kurt Vonnegut.”

5/5.

Rad book. Wicked. Quintessential bro lit.

2/5.

Well-crafted book about boring rich people behaving badly and thinking it’s interesting. So uncompelling. The reading of Nick Carraway as a treacherous and insecure is a good one, I think. The author is the antagonist.

This is universally assigned as high school literature? It’s sickens me to think of today’s poor kids with no personal freedom and an an increasingly slim shot at a tolerable life being corralled into engaging with this.

5/5.

Dostoyevsky’s best and most unexpected. It felt very current when I read it in 2022. Stavrogin is an excellent character. I meet Stavrogins everywhere and lose fights to them often. I meet a few Stepans too. With Our People is great. The appendix is shocking.

2/5.

The bad type of bro lit. Joe Rogan Podcast listener type book. One of the biggest red flags I can imagine is a guy who has a bookshelf that proudly displays this alongside 48 Laws of Power + a bunch of science books. Other kings did not have Aurelius’ fortune to be born in a time when they could be loved.

3/5.

Nice sentiments throughout. I guess I have to read City of God now.

He was promiscuous and hedonistic in his youth, he went so far as to steal off the pear tree just for the sake of committing a transgression. He wouldn’t marry his baby mama because he knew he had what it took to be a star in the early church. He felt soooo bad about it though. Who am I to doubt such a big man, a man so renowned and revered? My bad sir, how dare I criticize you! I’m sorry sir!

4/5.

For the boys. Rad book. Something wrong with you if you don’t relate to this on some level as a man. Moby Dick boiled down into it’s bare lines and forms. It’s not about the fish. Is it about the fish?

3/5.

Full of gags and antics, characteristically impossible to follow, and less of a time commitment than GR. Pynchon’s names are very funny.

Read in preparation for Gravity’s Rainbow, against common advice. (Some say read V.) I don’t regret what I did. No matter what you do it’s always the wrong thing.

4/5.

Exquisite, rich descriptions of a pastoral French village.

Unexpected edgy blackpills. A bad husband, one I am afraid of becoming.

2/5.

Overwrought with structure I don’t care about. I don’t want to read a polygon. It does nothing for me. There are nice passages and cute ideas. Like Ficciones but just not as great.

1/5.

Who voted to put this on the list? It’s ok but there must be million better books to read than this one. Only made tolerable through translation and commentary by Nabokov, which makes the experience of reading it feel like a good writing lesson.

3/5.

Grisly, nasty book about the freak creatures people become on junk. Surreal to the point it’s impossible to tell what’s going on. Important but not very fun to read. It made me dislike the beat generation even more.

My edition had an appendix with a huge amount of background material, including some somber non-fiction by Burroughs about overcoming addiction.

5/5.

5/5.

I had the privilege of reading this book unspoiled. Borges is out in full force.9

2/5.

I wished that the whole book would have been about the Airborne Toxic Event, forgetting that the whole point of this postmodern thing is to make fun of structure and cause and effect. I looked over my head and watched the jokes fly past. It felt kind of cold.

2/5.

Streams of consciousness made this one really hard to follow. The dreamlike presentation makes it hard to distinguish scenes and characters. Resembles 100 years of solitude in its depiction of provincial depravity.

3/5.

Very intimate, feels current. Japan seems to come from a very different moral tradition than the west.

Not rating this one. It is on the list because of long-dead memes. During the pandemic I moved my eyes over all the words in each chapter in Miller’s translation and then read Findlay’s analysis at the end like an answer key. I have fallen asleep to Sadler videos. Predictably this has led me nowhere.

When Hegel is writing about something he avoids any concrete references to it, so you are left with, like, these weird forces and movements and the Absolute. Like category theory or something. Only in the analysis is what he’s actually talking about revealed. Some passages stand out as insightful to me, like the passage surrounding paragraph 424, where he illustrates complications of language as a reliable medium for intentional meaning.

3/5.

Another edgelord pick. Uncle Ted’s caricature of a liberal man is funny and effective. He is smarter than me and would have despised me. I felt the heat of his contempt glowing out at me through the screen of the ThinkPad X230 I read this on during one particularly bad day in grad school. It made me a little more insecure about being so dependent on these incomprehensible, sprawlingly integrated technological systems. I doubt this sentiment now. Who needs more paranoia these days.

4/5.

For kids. I love Animal allegories.

A subset of the list’s other half stands out as likely-won’t-read for now:

• Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, Virginia Woolfe’s The Waves. I do not want to spend more cycles on abject, unbridled depression unless I know it will lead somewhere. I don’t think these do.

• Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel. I’m sure it’s a fine book but considering the political & economic state of the world right now...

• Critique of Pure Reason, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Das Kapital and Plato’s Republic demand background I don’t have and effort I can’t expend right now.

• William H. Gass’ The Tunnel, Musil’s Man Without Qualities. They sound tortuously boring. These must be books for people who enjoy the act of reading, in and of itself. Are people just claiming to have read these?

• Gaddis’ The Recognitions. Fatigue to anti-suburbia rhetoric.

• Tolkein. LOTR Fatigue.

• Dune. 1960s fatigue. Psychedelics fatigue.

• The Magic Mountain. No more boy-discovers-himself coming of age epics please.

• Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway. I can’t find a reason to spend more time with the dusty old guard of great American authors.

Anyway, on to better things.

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My cultural context is that i Haha react to images like these in MS Teams at my email job: