Five Books You Shouldn’t Read

Picture by florian.b via Flickr.

Life is short and bookshelves are long… and it’s too easy to get suckered into a book, keep turning the pages, start philosophising or daydreaming and forget to live. So here’s five books you should avoid like the plague if you don’t want to become a book addict:

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Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

It’s only about a middle-class family with five daughters whose sole aim in life appears to be to get married. I mean, how outdated is that? And it has a happy ending; so clichéd. So what if it’s funny and immerses you in the life of the characters? It’s not like anybody lives like that any more, right?

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Some boys run wild on a godforsaken island. Without an adult to supervise them too; no wonder they turn into bloodthirsty little savages. Who would have thought that Golding would win the Nobel-prize in literature when he wrote books like this?

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

It’s about war. It’s about the insanity of war. It’s so bizarre, it’s past being funny. All the characters want to do is to survive the war, is that reasonable? Where is the heroism?!… And to top it all, the phrase catch-22 spread like wildfire in English and a dozen other languages and it’s a veritable cliché by now.

Antigone by Sophocles

It’s a Greek tragedy, for god’s sake!… (You can’t be serious about even contemplating to read a Greek tragedy?) The characters are asked to make moral choices. They’ll do what they’re destined to do in the end anyway, won’t they? And the whole fuss is over whether somebody should be given a burial or not!

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A lunatic scientist called Frankenstein creates a monster by sewing together body parts from various cadavers. How disgusting is that? The whole thing is clearly the disturbed imagination of an 18 year old girl who only ever became famous because she married the poet Shelley.

(Just a tongue-in-cheek response to the day 2 prompt of Everyday Inspiration: Make a List. I started out to write a list of ten books you should avoid but got bored! If you want to read more book-lists, click here.)

P.S. You should not read book-blogs either! (They spread the reading bug.)