Top Ten Books You Don't Need to Read

If we've learned anything in the past couple of years it's that life is too short to lie to yourself. In that spirit, let's take out that list of books that you're supposedly going to read because of one reason or another and unburden yourself.

Palma de Mallorca

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude

One hundred years of solitude is right... That's the amount of time you need to finish reading this tome and by the time you're finished, you'll have produced a companion text in equal length composed of stitched together notebook pages, beer-stained cocktail napkins, hems of old t-shirts, carefully inscribed rolling papers, interesting looking leafs that are slowly decaying but still bear some kind of pictograph relevant to the endless Buendía family.

Give yourself a break and read Love in the Time of Cholera instead.

2. Infinite Jest

There comes a time in every reader's life when they develop a sort of hubris. They've been grinding through books for years at a voracious pace and they start to think that they're pretty cool because of that. So, they seek out the rockstar of difficult books, Infinite Jest, and it then sits on their bookshelf for a year or two, staring at the reader as they pore over short story collections and moderately sized novels and endless New Yorker pieces. Anything that might preserve their precious self-esteem, anything that helps them think they're well-read without having to tackle that dreaded book that hipsters and literature majors the world around gush about on first (and typically final) dates.

Leave it on the shelf. Or, better yet use it as a doorstop.

3. Dune

This science fiction epic is so influential that you feel like you've already read it. Kind of like a paleo-linguist reconstructing a dead language by the shadows and knowing winks of extant languages, you've pieced together most of what Dune is all about from the various movies and movies inspired by the movies and movies inspired by those movies inspired by movies. And isn't Luke Skywalker just Nor-Cal Paul Atreides? And isn't Arrakis and the Spice, Melange, just some extended metaphor for Saudi Arabia and its oil? And isn't there a fucking glossary in the back of that stupid book full of words that Frank Herbert (that sonofabitch) invented for this stupid novel?

Just watch the movie. Who are you trying to impress anyway? Dune nerds? Give me a break.

4. Catcher in the Rye

Seriously? Weren't you supposed to read this back in sophomore year of high school? Ah, no, stop. It's too late. It was already probably too late when you were in tenth grade, but they were still teaching it back then before J.D. Salinger got cancelled for being a proto-incel. Frankly this novel is just offensive in every popular conception of the term.

Read Franny and Zooey instead. At least that one is about women.

5. Gravity's Rainbow

Supposedly Thomas Pynchon smoked a lot of weed in Southern California while he was writing this ball-buster of a book and as anyone who has read it would say, "uh ... duhhhh." Are those chapter divisions? What are all these fucking ellipses eliding? How many times will he change his style in a single paragraph? Where is wartime Britain sourcing the shovel-fuls of cocaine necessary to sedate a supernatural nose?

I'd recommend a different Pynchon novel, but they all deserve to be on this list. The compulsion to read Pynchon novels is a sickness. Just watch episode ten of season 15 of The Simpsons, "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife."

6. Ulysses

Must we continue to make obeisance to this syphilitic Irishman? Maybe it's finally time that we admit that the act of reading Ulysses is the behavior of a stuffy soul whose youthful count in years does not match their interest in stories of antiquity. Maybe we can stop making every warm body with a cluster of active brain cells stumble through this artful paean to stories that we're supposed to read but never manage to finish.

Actually stumble drunkenly through Dublin. 10/10 from personal experience.

7. Johnathan Franzen's Latest Novel

I've got bad news for you. No matter how quickly you read this book, no matter how poignant your commentary on it in the current political atmosphere, no matter how clever your jokes are about those themes that keep popping up in Franzen's works... she's not going to sleep with you.

Read a whole issue of The New Yorker from cover to cover. That should scratch that Franzen itch.

8. The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This book, while being rather sexy in nature, is not going to get you laid. I'm telling you right now so that you might not have to suffer the fate of reading the whole thing and understanding it. I'm telling you this so that you might not stride into what you perceive as a pretty well-read group of people at a party and start expounding on the profoundness of the philosophical ideas intermingled with the themes of love and sex. You are twenty, thirty, forty years too late.

Read The Joke instead for some light reading.

9. The World According to Garp

I assert that Johnathan Irving is the modern day American Charles Dickens in style if not popularity, and as such you know that whatever movie they made of his story is not only out there waiting for you to rent, but also much shorter (if not significantly less boring) than the novel. If you do read the novel, you'll find yourself shocked, shocked! to discover that there are still 150 pages left to the book after Garp dies. Oh, did I spoil it for you? Give me a break, you weren't going to read it.

This one stars Robin Williams, who, as a man with a history of questionable film roles, at least had the huevos to take artistic risks.

10. That Novel Your Friend Wrote Last Summer

Oh my god, was it really last summer that they emailed you that link to their book? The link that is still glowing blue under the endless suffocating pile of emails from Bath and Body Works advertising a new towel set and Spotify notifying you that a new record from Cardi B has dropped (you like one song and the algorithm has you pegged for the rest of your life). It's fortunate that they live on the other side of town, but you're going downtown this weekend and what if you see them, what if they ask what you think of the novel? They know damn well that you haven't even fucking looked at it, the goddamn google doc has never displayed your icon, has never said "So-and-so is editing" and you both know it as you stand in line for a too-expensive beer on the wrong end of a Saturday night, that smug look of superiority they have on their face that seems to say, "Didn't you want to write a novel once? Whatever happened to that?" Like Raskolnikov, you're spurred to violent action and strike out with the heavy glass beer mug in your hand and beat your friend to death in the middle of the bar. "The nerd had it coming," you shout at the gallery in your defense. Hunched, animal, desperate, you growl, "Did you know they gifted me a copy of Dune last Christmas? Dune for Christ sake! Duuune!"

No, no... Stay home. Avoid prosecution.