NY grand jury indicts former President Trump
In an article by “The Editors of GQ,” the men’s magazine blasts the Holy Bible, declares it a book you don’t have to read, and suggests an alternative.
In its April 19 article, “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read” (originally, "21 Books You Don't Have to Read Before You Die"), Gentlemen’s Quarterly (GQ) trashes 20 books (“Huckleberry Finn” is counted twice, for some reason) it deems undeserving of their literary stature:
“[N]ot 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.”
GQ’s review of the Holy Bible begins with a snarky slight of Christians:
“The Holy Bible is rated very highly by all the people who supposedly live by it but who in actuality have not read it. Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced.”
As for the content of the holy book, GQ’s contempt is summed up by this one sentence:
“It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.”
Instead, the editors at GQ would have you read a tale of two brothers “who have to get along”:
“If the thing you heard was good about the Bible was the nasty bits, then I propose Agota Kristof's The Notebook, a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough. The subtlety and cruelty of this story is like that famous sword stroke (from below the boat) that plunged upward through the bowels, the lungs, and the throat and into the brain of the rower.”
Here is the complete list of famous books panned by GQ, and the magazine’s recommended replacements:
- Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry - Instead: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger - Instead: Olivia: A Novel by Dorothy Strachey
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves - Instead: Dispatches by Michael Herr
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - Instead: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho - Instead: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway - Instead: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - Instead: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
- John Adams by David McCullough - Instead: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard
- 9 & 10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain - Instead: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Fredrick Douglass
- The Ambassadors by Henry James - Instead: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer
- The Bible - Instead: The Notebook by Agota Kristof
- Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger - Instead: Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien - Instead: Earthsea Series by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Dracula by Bram Stoker - Instead: Angels by Denis Johnson
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller - Instead: The American Granddaughter by Inaam Kachachi
- Life by Keith Richards - Instead: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - Instead: Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
- Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon - Instead: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Instead: Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift - Instead: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne