The word "pretentious" conjures a certain image. Specifically, the image of that one guy from your junior year creative writing class, who had the word "funeral" tattooed on his forearm and wrote about how cheating on his girlfriend made him sad. Pretentious readers, with their non-prescription glasses and their insistence that poetry doesn't have to rhyme, can be irritating. So, when we come across a book that pretentious lit-boys just love, or even just a book with a particularly pretentious title, we're understandably suspicious. We want to make sure this new book won't judge us for wearing non-thrifted clothing and drinking Starbucks coffee. Lucky for us, some of the greatest books are being held back by their pretentious reputations. Here are a few books that sound pretentious but are actually really good, because you can like intellectual literature without being a jerk about it.
After all, a lot of our most "pretentious" literature used to be good old fashioned pop culture garbage. Shakespeare was wildly popular with the common folk back in his day, and derided for his lack of education. The Brontë sisters were considered the scandalous authors of trashy romance novels. James Joyce was banned all over the world for filling his books with slang and female masturbation. Basically, there's no such thing as high art, and all of these books are great, despite their outward pretensions:
'Ulysses' by James Joyce
OK, I will freely admit that Ulysses can be a bit of a challenging read. You're going to want to get a copy with footnotes. But don't let Joyce's reputation scare you away, because Ulysses is actually a beautiful, transformative, and deeply silly book. One chapter will be written in a stream-of-consciousness monologue, the next as a play, the next as a series of questions and answers. It's a weird book, for sure, and you won't grasp every single reference about 20th century Ireland, but Leopold Bloom's story is worth the effort.
'Everything That Rises Must Converge' by Flannery O'Connor
I think it's the title that throws people off here. But if you can get past her enigmatic titling, Flannery O'Connor's prose is actually quite clear, and her stories cut right to the heart of the (still all too relevant) tensions in America: outright bigotry, racism, and the hypocrisy of white liberals. Each story is beautifully gut-wrenching.
'Open City' by Teju Cole
'Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry' by Leanne Shapton
'What is Yours is Not Yours' by Helen Oyeyemi
'1Q84' by Haruki Murakami
'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men' by David Foster Wallace
If you're trying to come up with pretentious authors, David Foster Wallace is probably the very first name on the list. Infinite Jest is, indeed, a very long and somewhat difficult to read book. But Wallace's short fiction and essays are, for lack of a better word, delightful. They're funny, introspective, and pretty easy to breeze through, so pick up the collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men before you deem Wallace too pretentious to read.
'The Bell Jar' by Sylvia Plath
'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel García Márquez
'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' by Italo Calvino
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler does suffer from Pretentious Title Syndrome and yes, it is a meta-fictional novel about reading. But read a few pages and you'll realize that Calvino is not interested in impressing your with his intellect. He just wants to play with language, jumping genres every other chapter as you (the Reader and protagonist) set off on a mad search to finish reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.
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