The Holy Bible, the book upon which all of Western morality rested for the past 2,000 years, is the most overrated book of all time, according to an essay in GQ.
Written by the editors of GQ, “21 Books You Don’t Have To Read” is an exercise in pretentious millennial book burning, where very beloved classics, from “Lord of the Rings” to “Catcher in the Rye,” are thrown into a digital bonfire fueled by the self-righteous prattling of coastal hipsters, and replaced with the likes of modernist woke screeds.
On the Holy Bible, the editors allow for not even so much as a sentence of reverential treatment; the kindest thing they can say about it is that it has “some good parts,” all the while mocking those “who supposedly live by it.”
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. It is repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned.
Perhaps maybe that’s because the book wasn’t written to please the entertainment sensibilities of people who can’t go so much as an hour without checking their Facebook profiles. It worked for our ancestors to the point of inspiring them to create artistic masterpieces like this, this, and this. The best art that so-called “modern literature” can inspire people into is a transgender woman pissing into a jar.
Instead of the Bible, the GQ editors recommend Agota Kristof’s “The Notebook” (no, not the Ryan Gosling movie), “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.”
Other great titles get similar woke treatment. For the classic western “Lonesome Dove,” the editors recommend getting out of that “rigid masculine emotional landscape” and diving into something that sheds the “old toxic western stereotypes we all need to explode.”
I actually love Lonesome Dove, but I’m convinced that the cowboy mythos, with its rigid masculine emotional landscape, glorification of guns and destruction, and misogynistic gender roles, is a major factor in the degradation of America. Rather than perpetuate this myth, I’d love for everyone, but particularly American men, to read The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford. It’s a wicked, brilliant, dark book set largely on a ranch in Colorado, but it acts in many ways as a strong rebuttal to all the old toxic western stereotypes we all need to explode.
Hemmingway’s works also got slapped with the same “toxic masculinity” charge. For “The Old Man and the Sea,” the author of the section wishes to remind us how woke he actually is by revealing how his sympathies resided with the fish and not the fisherman in the story.
“Mostly, I kept hoping the fish would get away without too much damage,” he writes, going on to say that “when my grandpa pushed me to catch a trout at a fish farm, I threw the rod into the pond.”