Humor, Media Criticism, Social Commentary, Weird

The White Man Reading List

38 Comments

So, I saw this tweet:

I decided to see how accurate it was.

It was sort of a fail, at least for me. I own less than 25% of those books, and have read fewer than a third. Many of them I read as a kid, when my parents had copies.

38 thoughts on “The White Man Reading List”

  1. I own 5, and have read 2 more. I’m not too impressed with Nicole’s grasp of English (“literally all”).

  2. Silly attempt at clickbait. My house resembles a library, but fewer than 10 percent of her “white man’s” reading list.

  3. I’ve read 8, although the Shelby Foote listing is actually a trilogy. I’ve read several others by both Vonnegut and Rand. But where is Mark Twain, or Victor Davis Hanson?

    Some of the selections are bizarre. “The 9/11 Commission Report”? Really? I remember buying a Watergate Commission report back in the 70s, but never managed to slog through it.

    I own tons of books that I’ve never gotten around to reading, and yet I keep buying more. I’m a bit of a hoarder in that respect. But I didn’t see any of them on this list.

    Looks like I’m in danger of having my White Privilege revoked.

  4. My initial thought was WTF? I don’t think she has a clue. Is it like black women or gay Chinese could never own or read any of these?
    #CheckYourWhiteLesbianPrivilege comes to mind …

    1. My non white wife has read more of these than I have.
      Anyone for Robert Heinlein? This looks more like a reading list for boomers. I’ve never heard of half of these books nor do they look like something I would read. This reads like someone that doesn’t know much about books or males or whites. I mean Patriot Games is probably the weakest of all Tom Clancy’s works. But it is the first chronological book in the Jack Ryan books. It is as if she went to Wiki and used the first book in the list.

  5. Back in the day when we still had book store, I called them “the standing library” because I read fast enough that I could get much of what popular books had to say by skimming them.

    I was reading that book by Hitchens when an SWPL/SJW/whateverotheracronym babe came up to me. It was the sort of encounter of reading from the religion section and some woman hinting that one may be a kindred spirit and the sort of guy for a chaste dating relationship until a Christian wedding ceremony after which we would have numerous children. It surprised me that there was an atheist version of a girl atheist looking for a kindred boy-atheist soul-mate based on taste in reading (do atheists have “soul” mates?).

    I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I wasn’t into the atheist scene and I was only reading Hitch to get him to dish on one religion. To do that, I had to take my lumps for Hitch dishing on my religious beliefs. Father Joe Ratzinger tried dishing on that one religion without disguising it by criticizing all religion, resulting in some trouble.

    You know how these encounters work, the girl smiles and you, the boy smiles back, a few pleasantries are exchanged about the “evil caused by organized religion”, and the boy goes back to reading the book. Did I commit apostacy for not disclosing my religious “orientation”, or did I follow the Apostle Paul’s advice of not offering offense by not creating a scene in a Borders?

    1. “Back in the day when we still had book store, I called them “the standing library””

      Totally read that in Grandpa Simpson’s voice.

  6. What, no instruction manuals for Patriarchs? Or do American Psycho and The Godfather count?

    1. Going through Rand’s PDF…

      I’ve read the books by Roth, Friedman, and Levitt. I’m also slowly working my way through Tolkien.

      I’ve read only a part of Heller. Also a small part of Ellis, and that book is going into the recycle bin Any Day Now.

      I haven’t read the Larsson book, but I’ve seen both the Swedish and American movies. Likewise for Crichton, Tolkien, and Kesey. And does watching Airplane count for Hailey? 😉

      I’m not interested in books like those by Wallace or Pynchon. I guess I’m just too low-brow, although I might make an exception for Stephenson.

      There are quite a few books that look interesting to me, like Hemingway, Max 😉 , and Uris’s Exodus.

  7. Yeah, I’ve only read about 8 of those. Familiar with the themes of some others and seen the movies of a few more. In general, however, it was a weird list. Apparently I’m not “white” enough, despite being about as Anglo as you can get.

  9. Actually the books I have near my bed are the New Testament,The Art of War, and the Bushido Shoshinshu.
    Of those books in that list I have read like three of them.

    2. If I did not have any East Asian literature around it would probably be On War by Clausewitz instead of The Art of War and I guess some other rules of personal conduct book. Any suggestions?

  11. I was genuinely surprised, as I questioned many of the choices and also was astonished that I had read 37 of them.

    I should thank my mom again for the Kindle she gave me for my birthday four years ago.

  12. What’s amazing is how many of those are fundamentally of interest for either “supporting/exploring/explaining some other culture” or “denigrating some aspect perceived to be central to ‘Western Civilization’ “.

    Of the books left over, a chunk is ‘basically fluff’, and another chunk is ‘things the mostly female English majors forced us to read’.

    IOW: How is any of this -my- fault?

  13. If you have not read “Bonfire of the Vanities”, now would be a good time. Or you can just watch the news.

  16. Bah. I have 2 of those books, read about ten more. I spend so much time reading online that I don’t read much fiction anymore. No Asimov? None of the golden age sci-fi writers at all?

    I have a PDF with 54 complete books by Robert Heinlein. The whole file is 37 megabytes. Who needs a bookshelf?

  17. We could put together a list of books we imagine she’s got stashed in her house. Make it really over-the-top and it would still probably end up being more accurate than her list.

  18. Big Fail! Of those I own or have read there were nearly as many titles on that list that were required reading (required but not necessarily read) in high school English class.

    I wonder why she made this list. Is she genuinely curious about white male reading habits or just giving in to her biases?

    1. “(required but not necessarily read) in high school English class.”

      Same here but that is why they call them white men books.

  19. I own 13 (only because someone gave me a copy of Lolita; I haven’t read it).

    I did read the 9/11 comission report, though.

    (And of course I own The Stand. I also own every other Stephen King book up through the end of the 80s when he started to suck.)

    I think Vonnegut and Wallace are so overrated I’m never going to read them.

    (That said, who thinks “every white man” owns Godel, Escher, Bach? I mean, I do, but I was a philosophy major, and I own other Hofstadter books, too.

    And I also actually read Gravity’s Rainbow. Twice.)

    1. I don’t have any books under my bed. There’s no room for them with all the porn videos and skin magazines. However, I do own SHOGUN; the first volume of the Fire and Ice series; THE GODFATHER; ATLAS SHRUGGED, THE GREAT GATSBY, and LORD OF THE RINGS. I’ve only read about a third of the first, fifty pages of the second, and never got around to the third. Several others on the list (e.g., CATCHER IN THE RYE) I’ve read over the years but do not currently own. As one of the commenters says, does that make me part white?

      1. You’ve only gotten 50 pages into Atlas Shrugged? Oh, just wait, it gets good in about 700 pages, where you’ll find a 60 page speech.

    2. Several odd choices as others have mentioned; for example, although “The Big Sleep” is certainly Chandler’s best known work, “The Long Goodbye” is almost universally recognized as his best. And the lack of Heinlein in particular is absurd.

      But any list that has true classics like the well-known “Catch-22” and the sadly not well known “The Master and Margarita” has something going for it.

  21. My first thought on scanning through the list was: the proverbial White Guy would be more likely to own The Right Stuff than he would Bonfire of the Vanities.

  22. The Da Vinci Code?

    No Twain? No Heinlein? (No Hoyt, Bujold, Ringo, Carreia, Weber, Moon, or Lackey either!)

    Very little non-fiction; okay, I don’t read as much non-fiction as I should outside of work.

    No Bible? No Constitution?

    Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (okay, I haven’t read that myself.)

    Mein Kampf–to see what is predicted and happens. Also, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer.

    Churchhill’s histories; well, okay, perhaps I’m going above and beyond since it is a multi-volume set so let’s say The American Heritage Picture History of World War II.

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