When I want Great Books recommendations, it's a tossup between turning to GQ, Elle or Joe Biden's dumber cousin. But with Keith Olbermann gone, GQ needed to do something special to remind everyone that it was just Tumblr with more Mercedes and Rolex ads for the grown up Tumblrinas with jobs at ad agencies.
There's always ruining Thanksgiving.
This Turkey Day, consider making life HELL for a few of your relatives.
Or literature.
This time it's a list of 21 Books You Don't Have to Read. Because GQ readers only read books because they have to. Or at least they pretend to read books because they have to. And this is really a list of books that its metrosexual hipster readers don't have to pretend to have read anymore. And can just dismiss by calling its author a racist. (And a list of substitute books to have on the coffee table while Netflixing and chilling.)
GQ editors and their favorite angry writers imagine that the Western canon list of Great Books includes Lonesome Dove, Blood Meridian and Franzen's Freedom. It's typical of GQ, that the list is divided into books they were forced to read in school and books that were popular 10 years ago and they can safely mock.
But there are two specially stupid pit stops on the GQ literature tour.
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.. Instead: Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin
Perhaps Le Guin's work—along with an entire universe of fantasy fiction—wouldn't have been possible without Tolkien's influence behind it, but in its time, Le Guin's books are more influential and make for better reading.
Yes, that thing you like, but no one else has heard of, is so much more influential than Lord of the Rings.
The main event though is Caity Weaver, an ex-Gawkerite, turning in her book report on Huckleberry Finn.
The worst crime committed by Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is that it makes first-time Twain readers think Twain wrote tedious, meandering stories... Alternatively, read Frederick Douglass's firsthand account of slavery, which is equal parts shocking and heartbreaking.
This is the stupidest thing any human being (and probably Weaver) has ever written. But wait...
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, 'There There'
There you go.
Huck was once an ur text of liberals who wanted to expose the evils of racism and slavery. Then an anti-racist book was deemed racist.
Twain once famously claimed that conservatism was the worship of dead liberals. Then Leftism is the reviling of the men and women they once worshiped.
Sam was a man of his time. We have new men to worship now. And then hate. New gods to worship and kill.