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Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont really understand what is understood by pretentious here, but i figured out the kind of books being asked for by reading through the thread.
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When I was originally asking for suggestions, I used 'pretentious' in a somewhat ironic manner: basically I wanted books that have a reputation for being high-brow and intellectual, the stuff people mean by "literature" when they put the word in quotes. Most (or at least many) people would recognize these books, but probably have not read them because they expect them to be pompous and tedius. In fact they may, or may not be - I was mostly interested in the latter.
In other words, books that aren't just good, but which are also conversation starters. Here's an example: a couple of years ago I spent many a summer evening in Harvard Square reading
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, probably one time in four that I was out with it, someone would comment on my reading selection. Now, while an awesome book, it's quite a difficult read, because of this a lot of people assume that the only reason to read it is to somehow "impress" others.
Meta example: my giving the French title above could (as Tophat665 pointed out) be taken as pretention, or it could be that I just don't know if earlier translation's title or the more literal one is the "proper" way to refer to it these days. Pretention is often in the eye of the beholder, as well.
I think most of the people in this thread got the gist of what I wanted (despite the vague description), at least the suggestions were exactly what I was looking for.
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i guess pretentious is just the opposite of tedious reading.
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No, not at all.
Gravity's Rainbow is a paragon of both pretention and tedium; there isn't a person alive who wouldn't be put to sleep by the middle third of
Foucault's Pendulum (though the other two thirds are one of my favorite books).
In fact pretentious, but not tedious is a good way of narrowing it down towards the list I had in mind.