Acceptably Pretentious Literature

Literature isn't like music, I've realized--rattling off a bunch of writers no one's ever heard of will not cause people to ooh and aah at your insider knowledge of the underground. Just try and rattle off your favorite small-press heroes--your David Markson's, Gary Lutz's, Gordon Lish's, etc--and you'll get a bunch of blank stares from people wondering why you don't read real literature--that is, books they can also prattle about pretentiously.

The tragically hip wish to associate with reading that's "edgy," but still popular, it seems.

But there's little refuge in the "classics," either--name all the Dickens, Shakespeare, Twain and so forth you've read, and folks assume you're just regurgitating all your reading from High School, and question if you've read anything since.

Same thing with all that "ethnic" lit--your Richard Wrights and Toni Morrisons, etc--it is generally assumed you read these more out of multi-cultural duty than love, sadly.

Even the longer classic stuff they didn't make you read--your Tolstoys and Hugos, Goethes, Melvilles and Cervantes--make you appear more as a stodgy, stuffy, hopelessly-out-of-date throw-back, as opposed to some cutting-edge intellectual. Not hip at all.

You'd think the 20th century would thus be safer ground, but really it's even dicier--I've learned the hard way that even if you sincerely and honestly love, say, James Joyce, that any attempt to share that love with others will come across as sheer pseudo-intellectual posturing.

"You can't even understand it!" they decry (as though either Modernism or Reality is supposed to be understandable), "You're just too afraid to come off as ignorant to admit that this is nonsense!" I guess they've been burned by the Emperor's New Clothes before, and the burnt child fears the fire (I've found that the humble and kind, that is, those who don't have ego-problems or chase fads, are the only ones actually cool with my love of Joyce).

Mentioning Faulkner (especially The Sound and the Fury) will provoke actual hostility among those infuriated by books that challenge, not flatter, their intellectual self-image; likewise, Pynchon, Gaddis, Wallace, and anything by Beckett that isn't Waiting for Godot will similarly get you pigeon-holed as a pretentious, condescending, elitist, and an all-around self-important douche-bag who surely must not enjoy reading (I suspect they project themselves more than anything).

It should just go without saying that no American reads poetry anymore, either.

Yes, I'm afraid the only valid reason to read any of the preceding writings is because you sincerely love reading them, not because they'll impress anybody.

I have thus here compiled a brief list of Acceptably Pretentious Literature, books guaranteed to make you look cool and "intelligent" at parties, but are not so inaccessible that you actually have to work very hard to read them. (Please note, I'm not knocking any of these books, I've read and enjoyed and recommended them all--but this isn't a list for people who love reading, it's for people who wish to appear well-read):

• Catch-22 By Joseph Heller
  
• Catcher in the Rye By J.D. Salinger
• Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera
• The Picture of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde
  
• A Room of One's Own By Virginia Woolf
  
• Slaughter-House Five and/or Cat's Cradle By Kurt Vonnegut
  
• Waiting for Godot By Samuel Beckett
  
• Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte
  
• Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen
  
• House of Leaves By Mark Danielewski (Even this is pushing the outer-limits of acceptability).
  
• White Noise By Don DeLillo
  
• One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoyevski (No conversation about Nietzsche is complete without it).
  
• Hero With a Thousand Faces By Joseph Campbell (No conversation about Star Wars is complete without it).
  
• Tao te Ching By Lao Tzu (Only 81 pages! You can read it in an afternoon!)
• The Prince By Machiavelli (Also short!)
• Man's Search for Meaning By Victor Frankle
  
• Dante's Inferno (Just be careful not to read Purgatorio or Paradiso, as well)
• The Count of Monte Cristo By Alexsandre Dumas (The abridged version is acceptable, and now you can complain about the movie as a bonus!)
  
• Anything by Malcolm Gladwell (Business majors love him because he blows their minds with ideas that are first-semester to other majors!)
  

Again, I must emphasize that, with the exception of Gladwell, these are all worthy classics that everyone should read just for the sake of expanding your mind and broadening your horizons. All I'm saying is that these are the only books I've encountered thus far that you can safely discuss at parties. What else would you add to this list?