By The Beachwood Book Club
A list.
1. The Bible/Unknown. Have you read it? And which version? And the sequels? The Greatest Story Ever Told, but not The Greatest Story Ever Read.
2. Moby Dick/Herman Melville. Call me Ishmael. Maybe I’ll do my laundry now.
3. Encyclopedia Brittanica M-Z/Various. Hey, if you got this far you’ve really accomplished something.
4. A Brief History of Time/Stephen Hawking. You wanted to get it. You really did. This was supposed to be for laymen. But if watches run faster in space, isn’t that just the function of the watches logging artificial time and not real time actually running faster? It just hurts too much to think about. Turn on the baseball game.
5. Dreams From My Father/Barack Obama. Because it’s so unreadable. But you don’t dare admit that to anybody. You just mouth platitudes.
6. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich/William Shirer. It came with the bookshelves your parents gave you.
7. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire/Edward Gibbon. Ditto. And shouldn’t it be the Rise and Fall? Because Decline and Fall is kind of redundant, isn’t it?
8. Ulysses/James Joyce. Questioning central precepts of art theory by brilliantly testing our patience.
9. Infinite Jest/David Foster Wallace. A book taking place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment is either astonishingly obvious in its targets and humor or an attack on us readers ourselves. Or both.
10. The Red Badge of Courage/Stephen Crane. You know it’s good for you, but you just can’t force it down.
See also Hipster 101 (Books) and Hipster 101 (Music).
Posted on June 18, 2006