The Tuesday Top 10 this week is "books that you have bought (because you HAD to), but never read". I don't do that. I'm not a crusader of reading integrity, but I don't like to throw my money out the window. When I buy a book, it's because I'm sure I'm going to read it from cover to cover (you can imagine how much of a drag I am, to book shop with). In fact, I hate when people do that. So here's my top 10 of books I found on pretentious assholes shelves, that they never even read.
1-The Bible: If you're a religious person and own the Bible, no problem. If you're an intellectual freak show and own the bible because "it's the greatest work of fiction there is", you're just dismissing somebody else's beliefs and it makes you a shithead. If you give me a lecture about the fictional character of the Bible, I will leave your party.
2-The Phenomenology Of The Mind by G.W.F Hegel: The ultimate intellectual poseur book. It WILL look cool on your shelves. Hell, it might even intimidate people. It's the perfect book to flash around if you don't want anybody talking to you.
3-The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: I told myself "only one Ayn Rand novel". As most people dismiss Atlas Shrugged as fucked up and delusional, a lot see their ownership of The Fountainhead as a sign of their strong individualism and their intellect. Those who read it sing a different song...
4-The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: If you really read this with all your conviction, well fuck you. I don't want to be your friend. Anybody with an ounce of critical thinking will dismiss you as a punk if you have this. It doesn't make you a progressive thinker, it makes you a dweeb.
5-Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fate Of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: You'll hear plenty of assholes quote from this book (which they found on a web site, of course) to lend themselves credibility in an argument. To tell you the truth, I don't have any idea what that book is about. Nobody I know does. If I ever buy it (which is most likely, never), I'll make sure to understand it from cover to cover. For the moment, I don't even look at it on the store shelves.
6-Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky: I have read this one and the most use I ever got out of it was to shut up the people that quoted it out of context. Despite having an argument for himself, Raskolnikov doesn't really live well with what he did. Dostoevsky is always a hit with stupid people in intellectual circle parties.
7-The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Nietzsche: If you see The Anti-Christ standing alone on somebody's shelf, you know he never read it. And if my any chance he did (because it's less than a hundred pages), he's going to quote it like he's tripping on strong barbiturates. Since it's a book he wrote as he was going nuts, it's strongly recommended to have a grasp of Nietszche principles before quoting his transcendent ramblings.
8-Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida: If you're losing a literary argument, quote Derrida. It's the rhetorical equivalent of a punch in the balls. Painful and confusing. I had to buy this book for school and it exploded my head after thirty pages. It also exploded my teacher's head who didn't even find time to fit it in her corpus. How convenient. Forty bucks down the toilet and another week of Ramen noodles for me it was.
9-The Satanic Bible by Anton Szander Lavey: Actually, a few cool people have read this book. It's just that most have bought it and leave it on the shelves to impress their girlfriends with their dark, tormented poetic sides. Real men read Schopenhauer, not Lavey.
10-The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood: This is a very good book. Only problem, too many assholes have picket it up only to justify their right to read science-fiction. "Oh, have you read The Handmaid's Tale? It's a dystopia, it's so cool and original" is what you will hear from them. Their borrow the credibility of Atwood's name to justify reading post-apocalyptic stuff. Josie made me read it a while ago, it's a good book, but the fact that it's a dystopia doesn't lend credibility to any point. Atwood just loves to write dystopias.
