For some reason, Friar delved into a list of books provided by GQ entitled 21 Books You Don’t Have to Read:
We’ve been told all our lives that we can only call ourselves well-read once we’ve read the Great Books. We tried. We got halfway through Infinite Jest and halfway through the SparkNotes on Finnegans Wake. But a few pages into Bleak House, we realized that not all the Great Books have aged well. Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring. So we—and a group of un-boring writers—give you permission to strike these books from the canon. Here’s what you should read instead.
Sounds like the ill-read leading the unread to me, but it does present itself as a book quiz! Here’s the list. I’ve bolded the titles I’ve read:
| Old Canon: | New, Improved GQ Canon: |
| Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty |
The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford |
| The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger |
Olivia: A Novel by Dorothy Strachey |
| Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves |
Dispatches by Michael Herr |
| The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway |
The Summer Book by Tove Jannson |
| The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho |
Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector |
| A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway |
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard |
| Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy |
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt |
| John Adams by David McCullough |
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Clarice Millard |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain |
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass |
| |
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis |
| The Ambassadors by Henry James |
The Rise and the Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer |
| The Bible |
The Notebook by Agota Kristof |
| Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger |
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather |
| The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein |
The Earthsea series by Ursula Le Guin |
| Dracula by Bram Stoker |
Angels by Denis Johnson |
| Catch-22 by Joseph Heller |
The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi |
| Life by Keith Richards |
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard |
| Freedom by Jonathan Franzen |
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal |
| Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon |
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon |
| Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut |
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill |
| Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift |
The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Stern |
Of the entire list, the books that I have not yet read but might someday includes Dracula and maybe some Pynchon (although I think the title I have on my to-read shelves is The Crying of Lot 49). The rest of it? Meh, the kind of thing you already find on college syllabi these days.
But to call them canon–even some of those on the left side of the list–presupposes that anyone will give a flying fish about them in a couple of decades. Which I doubt.
