I hate how society tells me I have to read 500 Western canon

dumb frog poster

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>read a sci-fi adventure book
>federal judge sentences me to 10 years in prison for funhaving
WTF I thought it was Murrika!

Requesting comic of neckbeard acknowledging the difference between pieces of furniture, art, and music, but refusing to see the difference in quality in literature.

>>9476288
>I hate how society tells me I have to read 500 Western canon books or else I'm dumb.

It's actually only the works of dozen or so authors (off the top of my head, perhaps: Homer, Plato, various Greek dramatists, Shakespeare, Goethe, Wordsworth, Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett), and a dozen or so individual books (like before: The Bible, The Aeneid, Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Montaigne's Essays, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Middlemarch, Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick, In Search of Lost Time, Infinite Jest).

Everything else is simply "great books" that you could do without, and won't hurt if you read a fun sf/f novel instead.

>>9476361

I (OP) feel extreme guilt about this. And even I couldn't get through Nicholas Nickleby. That bored me to death.

>>9476361
you should read more poetry (you being 'society')

>>9476288
Normies don't know a single modern philosopher. And they sure as shit don't know who Bloom is. Don't be such a hysterical pussy.

>>9476361
>Infinite Jest
Heh

Did we not have this thread yesterday.

>>9476288
It's the opposite. Society tells you that you're "pretentious" if you read anything besides genre fiction.

>>9476484
Its a copy pasta

>>9476288
'Society' thinks you're smart if you've read a book that isn't Harry Potter. Calm down, frogposter. All is okay.

>>9476463

OP here again. That picture is exactly fucking right. I'm supposed to pretend that every single Dostoevsky sentence is an incredible insight into philosophy yet he wrote serialised farces.

>>9476463
This analogy always makes me facepalm. It's literally nothing more than a way for plebs to delude themselves into thinking that they aren't missing out. If I read you the script of a soap opera and then read you Hamlet, one would be objectively and aesthetically far more pleasing. That's because one is good and one is shit, they are in no way equivalent even if they are both a form of entertainment.

>Shakespeare is book + Harry Potter is book = Harry Potter is the same as Shakespeare amirite

>>9477052
Dostoevsky wrote mostly for money though. He was quite open about it.

>>9477052
>implying there hasn't been cultural decay

There's no such thing as "society".

>>9477107
>cultural decay
Where Shakespeare wrote his plays less than 10% of the population was literate at all, you're fucking retarded.