- Penguin Classics
- Ugh.
Hey, happy International Men’s Day, everyone! In honor of this special day, everyone should read Rebecca Solnit’s “80 Books No Woman Should Read” at LitHub immediately. Solnit rightfully skewers Esquire‘s “The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read,” which reads a bit like a taxonomy of assholes, a fact not lost on Solnit, who writes:
The list made me think there should be another, with some of the same books, called 80 Books No Woman Should Read, though of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. Or they’re instructions in the version of masculinity that means being unkind and unaware, that set of values that expands out into violence at home, in war, and by economic means. Let me prove that I’m not a misandrist by starting with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because any book Paul Ryan loves that much bears some responsibility for the misery he’s dying to create.
Though I’ve got a few points of disagreement with Solnit—I mean, SAY WHAT YOU WANT about Ernest Hemingway’s personal life, but I love spare prose, especially when it serves a thematic purpose, and most especially when it’s SPARE AND TRUE—but she finally puts into words what I know we’ve all been thinking about Jack Kerouac:
Speaking of instructions on women as nonpersons, when I first read On the Road (which isn’t on this list, though The Dharma Bums is), I realized that the book assumed you identified with the protagonist who is so convinced he’s sensitive and deep even as he leaves the young Latina farmworker he got involved with to whatever trouble he’s created. It assumes that you do not identify with the woman herself, who is not on the road and not treated very much like anything other than a discardable depository. Of course I identified with her, as I did with Lolita (and Lolita, that masterpiece of Humbert Humbert’s failure of empathy, is on the Esquire list with a coy description).
Hey! I remember that part of On the Road. I think that’s where I stopped reading because I was so bored? I mean, cool, we’re all like Roman candles brighter than the moon, moon, moon, etc., I get it, but am I really supposed to identify with this bro who just wants to spew sentiments regurgitated decades later by Katy Perry? LOL, no. Read the whole delightful, necessary diatribe here.
Whoa, someone made a list of books for men and many of them don’t appeal to women? It’s almost as if this list from a men’s magazine was intended for men or something….
The gall! Obviously a list of the “80 books that aren’t that interesting to men, but pass a woman’s smell test” would be the way to go.
Still, I find comfort in the fact that a man didn’t write ’50 Shades of Grey’.
… or the Twilight series…. etc etc.