Ulysses/Finnegan’s Wake (James Joyce)—Every English major has been in a class where this joke has been made, so it’s only natural to start here. Too long, too “authorial” in a just-get-over-yourself-kind-of-way, and there’s also this tortured brilliance about being able to admit you’ve been vanquished by a more able foe (i.e. Joyce). But really, too long.
Brothers K/War & Peace/Anything Russian With Last Names You Can’t Pronounce After Two Drinks—Ditto.
Anything by Bret Easton Ellis—Given how much of Ellis’s writing is about people strung out on drugs, “too close to home for me” or something like that about his work can always stop a cerebral drinking party dead.
Moby Dick (Herman Melville)—First twenty pages and last twenty pages is really all you need. The rest is about like sharpening your whale-pruning knife properly/“America.”
The Road (Cormac McCarthy)—Too dreary, existentially disheartening, emotionally weighty, etc. Like walking out of Schindler’s List, it’s okay to just put this book down.
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)—The psychologically convoluted love scenes (do I nail you in your architect firm office because you don’t want me to and thus I show my dominance over you, which you do like?) are far too weird/rape-ish. Plus you win points with liberal economists who don’t like Ayn Rand’s laissez-faire attitude.
Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie)—Reading about a man and his country is one thing, but melodramatic asides about mid-level Pakistani bureaucrats? Plez.
Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon)—Thomas Pynchon was invented to separate the wheat from the chaff of American intellectuals. Being familiar with his works? Big points. Actually reading/finishing his works (or at least this tome)? That defeats the purpose of Pynchon. He’s not to be read. He’s to be snidely jeered and dismissed as the John Cage of 20th Am. Lit.
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)—This one’s all about the reason you give for not finishing it. Saying it’s too long? No way. Saying it’s too depressing in a thinly-veiled autobiographical you-know-what-really-happens-to-poor-little Sylvia way? Correct.
Slash’s Autobiography—You find Slash’s fragmented postmodern narrator far too elusive. Plus you think the book smells like Jack Daniels.
Twilight (Stephanie Meyer)—This is the reverse of the rule, but by admitting to “starting” Stephanie Meyer’s shameless teen vamp series and then not being able to finish—for some snobbish reason, like Meyer’s style or her re-colonization of Native Americans through the werewolfing of Jake—you appear both outwardly experimental and inwardly elite. Sort of like saying, “I tried neoconservatism for two years in my teen years, but dropped it after reading Frankl’s whatever….” (That said, I actually finished this book. Hey, she creates a hell of a first-person narrator! Totes Team Jacob.)
– Dunstan McGill
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