You should read more this summer than 8 different copies of The Iliad
It’s the end of your first year, and memories from the first day of LitHum begin to haunt you. How were you so behind on reading? One by one, your classmates entered the room and began discussing the many works of fiction and non-fiction that they had read over the summer. You couldn’t believe the names that were coming out of their mouths; they just grew more and more formidable! We’ve all been there, feeling like we’re not educated enough to compete with everyone else. For all of you soon-to-be Proust-loving, Camus-reading, and Faulkner-worshipping scholars, look no further because we here at Bwog are offering a solution: the Pretentious Summer Reading List. Put on your spectacles, don your smoking jacket, and ready your pipe, because you have a tremendous amount of catching up to do.
Here are some poems, they should be read carefully, this haiku is done:
Walt Witman’s Leaves of Grass
Maya Angelou’s (what?! A woman?!) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Allen Ginsberg’s Howl
Ulysses (because you don’t belong here if you haven’t read this at least 5 times)
Haikus by Issa, Shiki, and Buson
You Kant forget philosophy:
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
Tractatus Logico-Philosophus (bonus points for reading this in latin!)
Foucault’s The Order of Things
Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for utter rapture
Plato’s The Republic
More’s Utopia
(Only for Barnard) (This is the feminist section):
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble
Plath’s The Bell Jar (but let’s face it, this is the #holybookofbarnard)
Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
Woolf’s Lady in the Looking Glass
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Novels that Kanye has definitely not read:
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Wallace’s Infinite Jest (obvi)
Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (is it pretentious to make fun of pretentious people or is it just really incredibly pretentious?)
Steinbeck’s East of Eden
Nobokov’s Lolita
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea
Gaines’ A Lesson Before Dying
Did you miss Hamilton? Yeah join the club:
The Federalist Papers -John Jay got sick after writing 5 (loser lol), James Madison wrote 29, and Hamilton wrote the other 51
We hope that you’ve been exposed to more Shakespeare than just Macbeth:
Hamlet
Macbeth
Othello
The Merchant of Venice
The Tempest
Henry VIII (but not Henry V, that’s too mainstream)
Romeo & Juliet (for the baby academics)
Now for a lighter list of books (but keep your smoking jacket on to appear elite):
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Great Gatsby
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Breaking Dawn (Psych! Just making sure that you’re paying attention.)
OK, that’s enough, what are you?
…But here are some authors to read in their original language for maximum overcompensation:
Hugo
Sartre
Proust
Zola
Marquez
Jerome
Murakami
Flaubert
Leskov
Tags
"columbia university in the city of new york" sounds so pretentious
#longreads
bonus points for original language
books
But what if I can't find my pipe?!
Bwog has a lovely collection of pipes
erudite
is it pretentious to make fun of pretentious people or is it just really incredibly pretentious?
moore's utopia is a statue
pretentiousness
so few ladies we're sobbing
summer reading
what makes the classics classic????
you should probably study a thesaurus so you can keep up in casual conversation
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6 Comments
@Knausgaard's my struggle come on, Bwot
@Okay but the Glass Castle is not actually by Virginia Woolf
@Ross Chapman Whoops! Looks like our glasses got messed up – guess we need a new prescription.
@Anonymous It’s the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and it was written in German…
@Reclining Figure Utopia was written by Thomas More, not Moore (like Henry Moore)
@Snooty McSnootsky Please move Steinbeck to the “Lower-Middlebrow Schlock to Be Read ‘Ironically'” section.