“Read it and weep, as they say. Bible, Hemingway, Vonnegut, Swift – the politically correct liberal police doesn’t think you need to read those books. No, instead you should read the lame-brained GQ editors that wrote the comments in their hipster-lame English. Pretty soon, there will be nothing left of the Western Civilization save for the writings of angry women with hairy armpits” –Poet Yana Djin
This week in GQ magazine, the editors decided to attack the western literary ‘Canon’ so to speak. Coming from Gentleman’s Quarterly, this is extremely rich. Below are some of the comments on authors such as Salinger and Hemingway:
“I actually love Lonesome Dove, but I’m convinced that the cowboy mythos, with its rigid masculine emotional landscape, glorification of guns and destruction, and misogynistic gender roles, is a major factor in the degradation of America”–Lauren Groff
“Hemingway’s novels—with their masculine bluster and clipped sentences—sometimes feel almost parodic to me”—Rumaan Alam
“They also happen to be the driest, boringest tomes you’ll ever sludge through” – Drew Magary on David McCullough
“Mark Twain was a racist. Just read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was a man of his time, so let’s leave him there. We don’t need him” — Tommy Orange
“It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.” — Jesse Ball on The Bible
“I loved all of Salinger’s books when I was young, but now I feel that they’re shallow” –Claire Messud
“while Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books are influential as exercises in world-building, as novels they are barely readable” — Manuel Gonzales
Here is the list of books GQ recommends be stricken from the reading list:
1. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
3. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
4. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
6. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
7. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
8. John Adams by David McCullough
9 & 10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
11. The Ambassadors by Henry James
12. The Bible
13. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
14. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
13. Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
14. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
15. Dracula by Bram Stoker
16. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
17. Life by Keith Richards
18. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
19. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
19. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
20. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
21. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Yes, read it and weep, as they say.
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My personal library contains maybe a thousand books or so (no, I don’t spend time counting them).
I just finished “China Crosses the Yalu” by Allen S. Whiting, which I am sure GQ would find dull as ditch water.
I read that because I came across reference to it in David Halberstam’s “The Best and The Brightest,” and I just ordered “American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines” by Roger Hilsman, a player in the Kennedy administration, for the same reason.
As to “Catch-22,” I read that when I was in Viet Nam.
Somebody over here sent me the book, and when I started it, I thought it was a parody on the Viet Nam war.
I kept looking back at the copyright to make sure it wasn’t.
That book should be required reading for all Americans, not buried, because it is one of the most accurate portrayals of American foreign policy I think has ever been written, with us giving our “enemies” our equipment to use so we would have a pretext to go to war with them – kind of like rich kids who want to play baseball giving their second-hand gloves and bats and balls to the poor kids, so the rich kids can be assured of having a weaker team to beat to make them look good.
Which takes us back to this footnote from “China Crosses the Yalu” by Allen S. Whiting:
Tsai Ying-p’ing, “The Road to Final Victory,” People’s China, Vol. I, No. 4, Feb. 16, 1950, p.27, offers estimates of the total amount (provided by United States) captured (by Communists from Chiang Kai Shek) in the (Chinese) civil war, without indicating condition of equipment or its subsequent disposition in combat (in Korea).
This includes 52,051 pieces of artillery; 297,740 machine guns; 2,612,126 small arms; 598 tanks; 378 armored vehicles; 492,799,000 rounds of ammunition; and 5,183,390 shells.
end quotes
That, of course, was wonderful for our economy, or at least that of the military-industrial crowd in this country.
Do they talk about stuff like that in GQ, I wonder?
I have “John Adams” by David McCullough, of course, and the GQ crowd probably doesn’t like that one because it has an awful lot of pages in it, which probably scares the be-jaysus out of the m, having to understand all those words and what they mean.
And of course, it is dry, because let’s face it, people, John Adams was a dry dude.
And what do the intellectually-challenged crowd have against “Gravity’s Rainbow” by Thomas Pynchon, other than the fact that it takes some time and concentration to understand the psyches involved there?
And “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut?
It’s good to see they didn’t include Marvel comics on the list, probably because that is where they draw their intellectual content from.
Next thing we know, they will want people to stop reading the Cape Charles Mirror, and then what will become of us?