In his fascinating essay "Unpacking the 'Red Flag' Bookshelf: Negotiating Literary Value on Twitter." [English Studies. 103:5 (2022): 706-731], my friend - and former collaborator on the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive - Edmund King expertly breaks down the context and larger implications of the list above.
In particular, he reveals - to ignorant ol' cellphoneless me, at any rate - the existence of a personage known as the "lit-bro":
The “Lit-Bro,” according to Geoff Baillie [in his article "Bro, Do You Even Lit?” The Strand (2015)] was “that guy in your English course: loquacious” and “eager to impress,” but chauvinistic towards women and ultimately utilitarian in his approach to literature. “Rather than reading for enjoyment or enlightenment,” Baillie suggested, “Lit-Bros treat reading as a means to show off how smart and cultured they are.”King goes on to suggest that the consequent wide take-up of the term "indicates that the lit-bro resonated with a much wider audience than students in graduate-level American creative writing courses."
That's putting it mildly! I've certainly run into more than my fair share of lit-bros myself ... Alas, I always lacked the poise and savoir-faire to aspire to that lofty perch myself.
But Jess McHugh's list presumably exists more as an early warning system for the detection of potential stalkers and serial killers than of the lesser menace of mansplaining pseuds. There'd be a lot more lit theory and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry on the latter's shelves, I would imagine.
Before we begin to break down the reasoning behind McHugh's particular selections, though, it might be as well to point out (as King does) the complex prehistory of such lists:
The title selections in McHugh’s tweet ... resonated with already existing expressions of the “problematic male bookshelf” theme (such as the contents of Dana Schwartz’s 2019 satire, The White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon). Although this was not a deliberate reference on McHugh's part, the seemingly metatextual quality generated by these resemblances may have especially appealed to Twitter users already familiar with the genre.Long before the rise of Twitter, it would appear, lists of “dating red flags” were "an established publishing and advice column phenomenon." In particular:
the most visible application of the “red flag” meme format to bookshelves in the context of dating lay in a series of list-format online articles that appeared in the early 2010s. In a June 2012 Flavorwire article, Emily Temple sought to identify which “books might send a potential mate running for the hills should they be spotted on your nightstand or peeking out from your back pocket.” Based on anonymous contributions from readers and other Flavorwire writers, her article listed J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Ayn Rand, Charles Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Hemingway, and “Anything — I don’t care if it’s Infinite Jest or Lolita or Moby-Dick — if it’s on an e-reader.”This article gave rise to a good deal of correspondence about just why these particular texts were so problematic:
Thompson readers were suspected of straightforwardly identifying with the author, one interviewee commenting that “I have never met a dude who was super-into Hunter S. Thompson who didn’t also wish he were Hunter S. Thompson.” A similar collapse of boundaries between book and reader also applied to Catcher in the Rye. “In my personal experience, any man over a certain age who still idolizes this book also still acts like a child,” one respondent noted.And so, brick by brick, the "red flag" canon was built:
A 2014 BuzzFeed article took the idea of identifying books with their male readers as an explicit conceit. Structured as a series of short, quick-fire conversations among six female contributors, the piece made humorous predictions about what various books would be like if they were reimagined as dating prospects. Infinite Jest would be “a self-identified feminist who mansplains feminism at you” and tells you “race isn’t real,” while A Farewell to Arms would be “So hot you don’t know why he’s single … until you do.”
I have to say that all this puts me in mind of such would-be side-splitting self-help manuals of the past as The Complete Naff Guide (which did admittedly while away many a weary hour for me in the 1980s); or - to go back even further - to Nancy Mitford's snobbish nonsense about "U and Non-U" English; or (for that matter) to Stephen Potter's comprehensive guide for social climbers, One-Upmanship (1952).
So it's not by any means that I'm blind to the attraction of such lists. I guess their appeal is two-fold, really. On the one hand, we want to laugh at other people's bad taste; on the other hand, we want to confirm our own superior acumen (if only by avoiding the texts so handily identified for us in advance) ...
Since McHugh's original tweet in 2020, King informs us, her list has inspired a number of other viral tweets on the “red flag bookshelf” meme:
These included one posted by the American comedian Michele Wojciechowski ... on 10 May 2021 that asked, “You’re on a first date with someone and they tell you the name of their favorite book. You immediately leave. What’s the book?” and received nearly 26,000 replies, 27,500 quote tweets (many of which nominated suggested titles), and 37,800 likes.
•
Kat Rosenfield: "top
warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf"[@katrosenfield, Twitter, 24 August 2020]
The next step in the response to McHugh's tweet was, naturally enough, a series of speculations on the possible “warning signs in a woman’s bookshelf”:
A diverse range of female- and male-coded accounts produced parody ... sub-tweeted lists that consciously appropriated and redirected the negative potential of these stereotypes, featuring Anais Nin, Camille Paglia, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen’s Emma, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Cheryl Strayed, Elizabeth Gilbert, “a dog-eared copy of Rebecca,” The SCUM Manifesto, and the assertion that “Wuthering Heights is my favourite book.”This sub-branch of the meme probably requires its own separate commentary - though I certainly appreciate that detail about the shrunken human head shelved behind a copy of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu ... What I can't quite work out, though, is whether this constitutes a critique or an endorsement of the French writer's somewhat fluid gender identity. Or neither. It's still pretty funny, though.
No, I think I'd better just stick to the straight and narrow and continue to speculate just why Jess McHugh's original group of authors have ended up in the dogbox. To recapitulate, then, her not-so-magnificent seven are (in alphabetical order):
- Charles Bukowski
- Johann Wolgang von Goethe
- Ernest Hemingway
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Ayn Rand
- Ivan Turgenev
- David Foster Wallace
- J. D. Salinger
- Hunter S. Thompson
- Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)
- Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power (1998)
- Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996)
- William S. Burroughs
- Mark Danielewski
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Bret Easton Ellis
- H. P. Lovecraft
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Mark Twain
To these we should probably add the two further writers in Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article (she also mentions Moby-Dick in passing, but only if it's "on an e-reader", so I think we can absolve Herman Melville from inclusion - for now, at least):
But the roll of dishonour doesn't really end there. King mentions that a large number of the responses to McHugh's original tweet listed:
additional “warning sign” authors and titles. The most commonly suggested titles were J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, with five nominations each. Other titles and authors suggested by more than one user were Robert Greene’s 1998 self-help book, The 48 Laws of Power (three nominations), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (two nominations), and Friedrich Nietzsche (two nominations) ...My own simple strategy of comparing my book collection to the "warning signs" list "and then simply tallying how many of its seven items they owned or had read" was also (unsurprisingly) anticipated by a number of the male respondents.
Several users suggested that their ownership of titles by William S. Burroughs, Mark Danielewski, Bret Easton Ellis, H. P. Lovecraft, and Mark Twain might also be “problematic.”So where does that leave us? With a lot more candidates for inclusion, obviously:
along with the following authors:
[NB: If I own any books by the author in question, I've put the name in bold;
if I own that particular title, I've put that in bold, too].
- Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems 1955-1973. 1974. Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.
- Naked Lunch. 1959. Introduction by J. G. Ballard. Flamingo Modern Classics. London: Flamingo, 1993.
- House of Leaves. 2000. London: Doubleday, 2001.
- Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1914. The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Vol. 4 of 12. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1964.
- American Psycho (1991)
- The Sufferings of Young Werther. 1774. Trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan. 1957. London: John Calder, 1976.
- The 48 Laws of Power (1998)
- A Farewell to Arms. 1929. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
- On the Road. 1957. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1967.
- "The Horror at Red Hook" (1925). In Dagon and Other Macabre Tales. Ed. August Derleth. 1965. Sauk City, Wisconsin: Arkham House, 1975.
- Gelatinous seafood and the smell of fish (severe).
- Unfamilar types of human faces that deviated from his ethnic norm (severe).
- Doctors and hospitals (mild).
- Large enclosed spaces - subway systems, large caves etc. (mild).
- He also seems to have had a mild phobia about tall buildings and the possibility of being trapped under one after a collapse.
- Very cold weather (probably justifiable, since he tended to faint in it).
- Lolita. 1955. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1965.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. 1883-1885. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. 1961. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
- Fight Club (1996)
- Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- The Catcher in the Rye. 1951. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. Illustrated by Ralph Steadman. 1971. London: Paladin, 1972.
- Fathers and Children: A Novel. 1862. The Novels of Ivan Turgenev, 4. Trans. Constance Garnett. 1895. London: William Heinemann, 1926.
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884. Ed. Peter Coveney. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.
- Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996.
There is something a little cultish about Bukowski's admirers. He's generally the only poet they read, and the blunt reductiveness of his style is seen by them as a kind of guarantee of integrity. And yet, having said that, there must be a reason that I still own a number of his books - as well as a copy of Howard Sounes' biography Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life (1998). His horror and despair resulted in some terrifyingly effective poems - not to mention the blank, Beckettian neurosis of his "novels". I wouldn't want to meet him, but I do think he has something unique to say. He shows no sign of fading on the page, as so many modish authors do.
Edmund King records in his essay that one of the tweets prompted by McHugh's list "suggested that stigmatising Bukowski readers could be regarded as 'classist'.” Whether or not one accepts that contention, King also mentions a tweet thread:by the American screenwriter Melissa Turkington ... [which] posted (with her own affirming commentary) photographs of an anonymous female reader’s disparaging marginalia that she had discovered in a second-hand copy of Charles Bukowski’s Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977).So the battle-lines have certainly been drawn.
I feel a lot less equivocal about owning Naked Lunch - along with most of Burrough's other works - than those few books by Bukowski. As for reading him: well, many of his texts - particularly during the 'cut-ups' era - are admittedly a bit of a chore. There is, however, a central core of terrifyingly visceral work saying some things about modern society which could only have come from so complete an outsider as Burroughs.
Does he still have fans? Maybe. I've never met any. For the most part, like so many counter-culture authors, he seems to be read now mostly by aging hippies and literature professors (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).
I did enjoy House of Leaves - but then, I'm rather keen on odd layouts for books, and Danielewski must have driven his printers mad with all those blocks of differently-sized text leaking into marginalia and other acts of graphic bravado. The story was solid, though - if a little over-elaborated in parts - and it was a certain feeling of anticipation that I opened the copy of his follow-up novel, Only Revolutions (2006), which I'd purchased from a local second-hand bookshop. They had a stack of them there, oddly enough. I wonder why?
I don't know who his target audience was - "lit-bros", perhaps - but this new book was unfortunately a long way outside my comfort zone. The article about it on Wikipedia does its best to explain it as follows:By reading both stories some sense can be made from this poetic styled puzzle. The words written are a vague mix of poetry and stream of consciousness prose. Both Hailey and Sam depict their feelings as well as ideas and thoughts towards one another.Is that enough to sustain interest through all those hundreds of tightly-packed pages, though? Not for me, alas. His projected 27-part epic The Familiar (2015-2017) appears to have bogged down after a mere five volumes. He's certainly a talented writer, and perhaps future ages will hail him as a genius, but (for now, at least) I fear my interest peaked with House of Leaves.
I first came across a link to Edmund King's intriguing essay in the replies below a May 1, 2025 facebook post by David Hering, entitled "The absolute worst cultural trend of the last decade staggers on." Hering went on to add, with the caption "What the hell, sure":Zachary Norwood replied to this: "This is sad. Lolita and Crime and Punishment are necessary reads, imho."
While he isn't included in King's analysis of the responses to McHugh's tweet, Dostoevsky does seem a natural candidate for the list, given the notorious gloominess and psychological intensity of many of his plots. Whether or not it's true that his work appeals more to adolescents than to "mature" adults, there's no doubt that it contains a good deal of tortured introspection.
What's more, like most nineteenth-century Russian novels, his later works (in particular) are very long, and therefore somewhat time-consuming to read. They certainly match the paradigm of being exceptionally difficult and demanding common to many of the other items included here. For myself, I'd gladly reread The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot, but it's been a long time since I felt the impulse to revisit Crime and Punishment or The Possessed.
I do remember seeing the ugly-looking paperback version of this book for sale in local bookshops - in a clingfilm wrapper so that children wouldn't pick it up and chance upon some appallingly gruesome scene which might scar them for life. It was the first time I'd seen such an extreme reaction to a novel in these parts, but I fear that even that didn't tempt me to read it. I've never been a big fan of splatter-movies and gore in general.
Of course, the book is far more sophisticated than that (as we were told ad nauseam by various wiseacres at the time): a satire on the shallowness and consumerism of the 1980s. I did eventually watch the movie, but - dare I say it? - found it more boring than anything else. The murder scenes were nasty, but it was all the stuff about business cards and ties and so on which was really yawn-making. I understand that that was the point Ellis was making, but there's always a certain risk in underlining just how boring some things are by portraying them boringly.
Again, I've never met anyone who seemed to admire the book or to have enjoyed reading it, but it certainly made Bret Easton Ellis a mountain of moola and confirmed his status as an "edgy" star author.
The question "Why Goethe?" is a pretty obvious one, and it's one which came up repeatedly in the response to McHugh's original tweet:A representative example of these tweets asked, “What’s wrong with Goethe? Wilhelm Meister is wonderful.”Goethe's numerous love affairs might be regarded as somewhat problematic, I suppose, though hardly affecting his status as a "classic" author. Luckily King is able to tell us why he's there:The large number of users puzzled by Goethe’s presence in the list ... were presumably unaware of Goethe’s inclusion in earlier iterations of “problematic male bookshelf” discourse, such as Dana Schwartz’s White Man’s Guide to White Male Writers of the Western Canon. The specific pushback against Goethe’s inclusion also, perhaps, illustrates the highly US-centric nature of the “red-flag bookshelf” meme. A German Twitter user would likely have a very different response to Goethe’s presence on the list than an American user familiar with Schwartz’s book and, perhaps, with Goethe’s recent appropriation by certain platform-based micro-celebrities associated with “incel” (involuntary-celibate) American internet subcultures.I'm assuming that it's his early novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers which inspired the interest of these "micro-celebrities." It's useful, too, to be informed what "incel" (mentioned in Kat Rosenfield's tweet above) means - as well as being reminded how "US-centric" all this palaver actually is.
I hadn't previously heard of this book, so it's been quite interesting to read up on it. In the Reviews section of the Wikipedia article devoted to Greene, I note the following reactions:People's Magazine has referred to it as "a wry primer for people who desperately want to be on top." Allure described the book as “satisfyingly dense", and "literary", and continued that it is filled "with fantastic examples of genius power-game players" ... Jerry Adler, writing in Newsweek, lists ways the laws contradict one another and states, "Intending the opposite, Greene has actually produced one of the best arguments since the New Testament for humility and obscurity." Kirkus Reviews said Greene offers no evidence to support his world view, that his laws contradict each other, and that the book is "simply nonsense".Still, it so impressed the rapper 50 Cent that he proposed a collaboration between Greene and himself to produce a sequel. The result, The Fiftieth Law, became, in due course, another bestseller.
The 48 Laws of Power does sound as if it's earned its place on any respectable "red flag" list, but perhaps I'm just biassed against self-help books in general ...
I haven't read it for many years, but this novel affected me greatly when I was a teenager. I still recall many passages from it, and it's hard for me to see it as constituting any kind of disgrace either to its author or its many admirers.
It's important to note that what McHugh actually says is: "Too Much Hemingway", rather than citing any particular text (or texts). So the question then becomes, how much is too much? And, as usual, I fear the answer may be: "If you have to ask, then you're already in trouble."
My own obsession with literary completism means that collecting Hemingway involves all of Hemingway: novels, stories, travelogues, biographies and memoirs included. But then that's probably a problem of a different stripe from the one envisaged by McHugh.
This one, too, I read as a teenager, but I'm afraid that even then I found it a bit difficult to understand what all the fuss was about. I'd been expecting something considerably more revolutionary and mind-bending, I suppose.
I suppose a generalised fear of hippiedom in general is not entirely unreasonable, but otherwise I would see this as a fairly innocuous addition to any respectable bookshelf.
The thing to note about Lovecraft is that he wore his prejudices on his sleeve to such an extent that they're impossible to ignore. His phobias included (according to a blogpost by David Haden):He was, to be quite honest, one sick puppy. And yet ... there's something endearing about him, nevertheless. He was such a simple soul - so fond of writing to his friends about his latest antiquarian and literary discoveries, so keen on travelling to strange cities and examining every architectural detail of their buildings.
If you read through the five volumes of his Selected Letters (as I have) you begin to feel to know the man - and I have to say that a lot of the appallingly racist and sexist comments he made on a regular basis seem, in context, more like listening to a South Islander slag off Aucklanders than manifestations of a violent Ku Klux Klan-style mania. He was just as prone to look down on anyone who wasn't fortunate enough to have been born in Providence, Rhode Island as on people of other ethnicities. His wife, who was Jewish, asked him once how he could be such an antisemite in theory and still be married to her. "Oh, you're different," he replied. "You're civilised."
I don't say this to excuse him (Heaven forbid!) but if you can get past your immediate sense of recoil at his racist rantings - generally in the context of fictional recreations of New York, which seems to have appalled and alienated him to an extraordinary degree during the 18 months or so he lived there - you may find the sheer gothic power of his writing and the acuteness of his intellect not without interest.
King mentions that five of the tweets prompted by McHugh's list "defended Lolita’s literary value".One user judged it “brilliant” despite her having avoided reading it for many years due to its subject matter. Another female poster claimed that the book had a feminist message about the male domination of women and that any man who understood it in that way was “a keeper.”I used to tutor a university paper on the modern novel which included lectures on Lolita by Professor Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer. Any critical distance between author and biographer had long since evaporated during all his years of researching the great genius (whom, interestingly, he never met). To hear Brian talk, you'd think Lolita was a pure morality tale: a horror story told from the point of view of the monster. And there's something to be said for this view. I should know. Brian said it all - at length.
Nabokov's own comments about the inspiration for the novel are interesting in this respect:As as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: the sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.But is the ape to be identified with Humbert, confined in the cage of his own intricately self-justified perversion? Or is it "Lolita" (Dolores Haze herself) - warped by his remorseless abuse into the proud but damaged young woman we encounter briefly towards the end - who can see nothing beyond these manifestations of her own imprisonment?
It's hard to imagine anyone actually being sexually aroused by the intricate logorrhoea of Nabokov's strange novel, but I suppose anything is possible. As a study in morbid psychology, it certainly does run the risk of encouraging readers to identify with the solipsistic Humbert rather than with his (carefully muted) victims, but that is the risk of fiction: no matter how ironic your intent, someone can always be found who will take it all literally.
Did Nabokov himself share Humbert's proclivities? He does such an excellent job of portraying the mentality of such a man, that it does make one wonder. But then, if you did have such urges, would writing a confessional novel about them be such a wise procedure? And Nabokov was nothing if not canny.
All in all, while he was clearly able to imagine a Humbert, there's really no reason to suspect that there was any more to what he was doing in the novel than that.
In a way I envy those who can sit down and read through the works of Nietzsche. I have to say that I tend to nod off pretty quickly - but then that applies to my experience of the writings of most other Germanic metaphysicians. Dare I suggest that many of his staunchest admirers base their enthusiasm on a few stock aphorisms, plus some dim recollections of a first-year philosophy course?Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!"Goest thou to women? Forget not thy whip!" Certainly this particular piece of wisdom, from Also sprach Zarathustra, has not exactly endeared him to posterity. An interesting discussion on the Philosophy Forum suggests that, in context, Zarathustra may be referring here to "life" and "wisdom" as female personifications - thus implying that you should impose yourself upon life rather than simply submitting to it.
Unfortunately for this reading, however, there are plenty of other misogynistic passages in Zarathustra's long rant which leave rather less room for manoeuvre:Surface is woman's soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.It does appear to be true that Nietzsche's final work The Will to Power was edited for posthumous publication by his enthusiastically Nazi sister in order to align it more with the Führer's views. Nevertheless, I can see the justification in seeing copies of any of his works in pride of place as a danger sign in a potential partner.
Man's soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns: woman surmiseth its force, but comprehendeth it not.
The most endearing thing about the man seems, in retrospect, to be his (alleged) sympathy for carthorses.
I do own one novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I had some discussions with a graduate student in our department who was studying his work, during which she did her best to convince me that it constituted some great Balzacian Comédie humaine of interlocking fictions.
I didn't much like the film of Fight Club - though the book may well be better for all I know. It was impossible for me to persuade myself that a bunch of guys who saw Edward Norton beating himself up in a parking lot would immediately adopt him as their guru. Having a fist-fight with Brad Pitt, yes, maybe - but punching himself? Nah. They'd either laugh and move on, or give him a kicking themselves on general principles.
The book of his I did end up buying was called Haunted: A Novel of Stories (2005). I'd hoped for something ghostly, but the first story concerned a boy who tried to use a vacuum cleaner for various nefarious purposes and ended up doing permanent damage to his insides. It just didn't seem either: 1/ life-enhancing; or 2/ plausible enough for me to take much of an interest in it.
So I guess I'd have to see some justification for this one's red flag status, though our quondam PhD student would certainly demur.
Well, I haven't read any of her books, so I don't really have a right to an opinion. Certainly the overall tenor of her views - as expounded in the various articles about her I have read - does sound a little on the reactionary side. Nor has the critical reponse to her work been particularly encouraging:Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers [of Atlas Shrugged] seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs", with reviews including comments that it was "written out of hate" and showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity". Whittaker Chambers wrote what was later called the novel's most "notorious" review for the conservative magazine National Review. He accused Rand of supporting a godless system (which he related to that of the Soviets), claiming, "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard ... commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'".In 2019, Lisa Duggan described Rand's fiction as popular and influential on many readers, despite being easy to criticize forher cartoonish characters and melodramatic plots, her rigid moralizing, her middle-to-lowbrow aesthetic preferences ... and philosophical strivings.All in all, beyond her immediate magic circle of "Objectivist" disciples, it's hard to find anyone much who seems to rate her either as a novelist or a philosopher.
Well, yes, like everyone else, I read this book as a teenager. I did enjoy it, but it didn't impress me as much as his short stories, to be honest. Franny and Zooey is probably my favourite book of his.
The reason why Salinger came up in the correspondence caused by Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article was apparently because of a "collapse of boundaries between book and reader" in the case of The Catcher in the Rye specifically:“In my personal experience, any man over a certain age who still idolizes this book also still acts like a child,” one respondent noted.Certainly a recent viewing of the 2013 Salinger documentary revealed just how many earnest seekers would try and hunt down the author in order to receive personal wisdom from him, so there could be something to be said for this point of view. It's a little extreme to equate everyone who "idolizes" the book with those who simply read it, though.
The responses to Emily Temple's 2012 Flavorwire article also contained the following aperçu about the apostle of gonzo journalism:Thompson readers were suspected of straightforwardly identifying with the author, one interviewee commenting that “I have never met a dude who was super-into Hunter S. Thompson who didn’t also wish he were Hunter S. Thompson.”I must confess to having myself read most of Thompson's works, including his collected letters. I've never felt any particular mission to become a gonzo journalist myself - I doubt I lack the stamina, for one thing - but Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, in particular, was very informative about the true nature of American politics. The same could be said of his other major works of reportage: Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in their very different ways.
And yes, his super-fans can be a bit of a pain, but Thompson himself seems to me to have had more in common with the equally self-destructive F. Scott Fitzgerald than with most of the other coke-fuelled obsessives of his time. Like Jay Gatsby, Raoul Duke now feels like a figure locked in amber, lost in the dark backwards and abysm of the 1960s.
Nabokov and Nietzsche, yes, I get it - even, perhaps, Goethe. But why has poor old Turgenev - or, rather, more specifically, his most celebrated novel, Fathers and Sons - ended up on this list?
The rather dodgy Gateway to Russia website attempts an answer to the question "why iconic Russian novel 'Fathers and Sons' is still controversial today":Ivan Turgenev was ... the first author in Russian literature who openly raised the topic of the generational divide. “Aristocracy, liberalism, principles… Just think what a lot of foreign and useless words! To a Russian, they’re no good for anything!” This is what the young nihilist Bazarov thinks about the older generation and its conservative way of living. The novel’s title in Russian is “Otsyidety,” which has become a catchphrase still widely used today.Bazarov is certainly a bit of a pill, and meeting someone who admired him intensely might be rather a buzz-kill. The main problem Turgenev had with the novel, however, was that it simultaneously offended both the left and the right in Russia: the left because it failed to endorse Bazarov's nihilism; the right because it dared to air such questions at all in a non-judgemental context. ""Oh, those Russians", as Boney M. once put it. You just can't win.
Mark Twain had a good deal to say on a great many subjects throughout the course of his chequered career. I don't quite know why anybody should feel ashamed to have his books on their shelves. True, Huck's companion on his raft-trip ("Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!", in Leslie Fiedler's famous phrase) has a name which can no longer be repeated in polite society - a little like the title of Joseph Conrad's third novel - but is that really of consequence?
For myself, Twain's strident denunciations of European colonial aggression in the Congo, coupled with his even more eloquent account of the attempts at genocide by the American government in the Philippines, would be sufficient in themselves be enough to place him on the side of the angels.
"He was the Lincoln of our literature," stated William Dean Howells. Like Lincoln, his complex views on race and freedom have received almost as much criticism as praise in recent years. In the end, though, if you're blind to the merits of the great emancipator, then I suspect that you may have set your bar impossibly high.
The same applies to Mark Twain. He never created a flawless book - but at his best, as in certain chapters of Huckleberry Finn, he wrote in letters of fire. As Hemingway said in The Green Hills of Africa: “It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
Edmund King explains helpfully that: "Revelations of domestic violence by David Foster Wallace made in the context of the #MeToo movement in 2018 ... moved journalist Julius Taranto to publicly re-evaluate his youthful Wallace fandom":[Wallace’s] work reads differently to me now than it did then. I’m a little ashamed of how much I once loved it. It … seems sort of juvenile and aggressive in a way I didn’t sense before. It feels infected by postmortem evidence of his real-life moral failings, including his pretty shameful treatment of women.I did try to read Infinite Jest. After a few hundred pages, though, I found that my interest in the Canadian mafia and the intricacies of tennis was insufficient to motivate me to continue. Various friends reassured me of his brilliance, though, so I purchased a copy of the equally immense David Foster Wallace Reader, which included many of his short stories and other work.
Alas, even there I found myself unable to proceed beyond a certain point. Wallace seemed to expend so many words to get to his objective that the subject matter itself began to buckle under the strain. How does Prince Hal put it while reading Falstaff's grocery list? "But one halfpennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack!"
I'm quite prepared to believe that this failure to finish is mine, not his - but I suppose the point I'm cranking around to, is that the presence of a book on a shelf may mean far less than it seems. The fact that it's still there could be an indication that its owner (or borrower) has not yet managed to get beyond the first page ...
When you see them en masse, I have to agree that there is something a little grim and depressing about this particular rogue's gallery of authors - but then, while there are many reasons for shutting yourself up in a small room and writing obsessively, the fact that you've been blessed by nature with extravagantly good looks isn't one of them.
As the rather sheepish owner of some 20,000 books, I have to say that that fact alone is more likely to form a lasting impression on any chance visitor than the presence (or absence) of any particular tome.
Some of those who tweeted in response to McHugh's original list
suggested that owning no books, using bookshelves for any purpose other than housing books, or not being able to specify a favourite author when asked should also qualify as potential “red flags.”That's certainly not my problem. Naming a single "favourite author" might be a little more challenging, however - given the bewildering catholicity of my tastes.
The strategies embodied in these tweets resemble the “I know perfectly well, but still … ” formula ... [In] this way, readers either strategically disavow their own literary tastes (but in ambivalent ways that enable them to maintain emotional distance), or, via absurdist humour or provocative self-implication, seek to undermine the logic of the meme itself.Yep, that pretty much sums up the purpose of this post, I'd say. I didn't think I'd get away with it unscathed - but it's nice to know that King had my type of would-be smart-arse pegged in advance.
The [2014 BuzzFeed] piece ends by straightforwardly offering market intelligence to the (single) male reader. The types of dating partner most in demand, it asserts, are men who read diverse authors (“NOT JUST DEAD STRAIGHT WHITE DUDES”) but not in a too-obvious or tokenistic way (by, for instance, claiming to like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth simply in order to “shout,” unconvincingly, that “‘I RESPECT WOMEN!’”).I don't know about America, but certainly in New Zealand it'd be rare to find many books at all in most of the flats and apartments one enters - so I doubt it's a comparably major determinant in mating rituals in these parts.
Otago Daily Times: Brittany McKinnel and Natasha Pelham in their Brown St flatPhotography: Peter McIntosh (28/9/2011)
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