THE BEST OF SEPTEMBER

HAWTHORNE - YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

"Blasphemy against the true woodsman
This short tale, like many of the effervescent Hawthorne's works, exposes the general contempt that dutiful professionals of urbana have against the farmer. Here, a charming young man is afraid to explore the limits of his soul, who must venture the forest to retrieve a lost treasure, but will not, would not all his spirit to traverse the darkened elements.

Several generations of good language arts teacher, of the secondary caliber, are subverting their classes with this work. They had been seduced by the charms of this Harvard-graduates eloquence. Unknowing the true interests of the youth, our cultural shame is that nearby along the shelves is a book written by his neighbour called Walden.

It would benefit the 7th grader to read Thoreau than more than having his teacher's fantasies insinuated through this other work."


SHAKESPEARE - MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

"I did not like this book very much. There was a lot of conflict between characters."


MACHIAVELLI - THE PRINCE

"Niccolò Machiavelli was a Big Fat Idiot

Machiavelli's The Prince is a piece of filth. Everything that is wrong in the world today can be directly attributed to this atrocity.

Take, for instance, crime. The basic mentality of most criminals is that crime pays for them, so long as they do not get caught. This philosophy is remarkably similar to that of Machiavelli, and is most likely derived from his work. Machiavelli taught that the end justifies the means. This can be easily interpreted as an encouragement of crime, so much as the criminal was benefiting from the crime he was committing. Criminals thought it was a good deed to murder, steal, loot, pillage, and rape; they perceived themself as making other people proud by vandalizing and slaughtering animals. Without Machiavelli's philosophies, criminals would not feel that they themselves were justified in their actions and all crime today would have been averted.
...
Further evidence of the threat of The Prince is prejudice. The basis for all prejudice is Machiavelli. At one point in his work, he refers to being 'effeminate' as a bad quality, synonymous with being cowardice. Thus, he advocated the belief that men were superior to women. Followers of Machiavelli soon took this belief and expanded it to include all that are not biologically similar to them as being inferior. Before long, people would run down streets, screaming in ignorance, claiming that the star-bellied sneeches or what have you were not true sentient beings, reducing others and themselves to sub-animal status and thus commencing the demise of human civilization.
...
In addition, the work of Machiavelli is the sole cause of poverty. Machiavelli encouraged the rich to keep all their money to themselves; he claimed it was better to be miserly than generous. As a result of this, the gap between the upper and lower classes was increased on both ends. The rich continued to become more lavish and extravagant, shoving their fine coats and money in the faces of the poor, while the poor, cut off from all the donations they would have received, became more miserable, and started smashing stuff in rage. However, since Machiavelli advocated the idea of being feared rather than loved, the upper class thrived off the lower classes fear that they would be slain mercilessly rather than showing love by helping eliminate poverty."


MELVILLE - MOBY-DICK

"Moby Dick is actually a bit of a joke in literary circles. It is poorly written, and it likely would not be published today if it weren’t for its reputation."


ELLISON - INVISIBLE MAN

"A seminal work in 'race relations' -- a genre that should have been banished to idiocy (along with religion and the death penalty) years ago. What I mean by that is this: there is no such thing as 'race,' and people should realize we are all just *people* and move the hell on."

"The only think this book is about is how black people were treated so badly, I don't feel bad for them because they didn't try to change it."

"I believe this novel was also written as a narrative, retaining the overall quality found within a narration. The author displayed the style of writing with historical accuracy and radical development. Done in a narrative style with a strong sense of time and place, Ellison was aware of his ideas and character's growth throughout the novel. I strongly believe that Ellison was aware of this theme. He displayed it accurately throughout."


FAULKNER - AS I LAY DYING

"makes me cry and shit myself."


CICERO - ORATIONS

"Greeks and Romans were idiots ... Pretty much there's the Greek gods, Zeus and all this other stuff. And pretty much all they do is run around on top of mountains zapping each other with lightning bolts and throwing spears at each other. I mean... really? Not very creative, first of all. Pretty much all they did was bad things, they killed, they tormented, they hurt each other, and it's like what kind of God would want to do that? ... It's stupid. And then the Romans, they're like the kid at school who goes up to the person who always gets Fs and cheats off their test except for changing it just a little bit so that the teacher won't think they're copying. It's like seriously they just take the gods pretty much and just change the names ... And then they copied their architecture, they copied everything. They're so similar. They're so similar that I confuse the Greeks and Romans like every day.
...
It's like what would cause these guys to think of all this? Well, the main cause that I would think of is maybe they're totally insane. Maybe they're just plain idiots.
...
And sure, they might have been smart in like math, but who gives a crap about math? I mean, knowing the basics is good, you need to know the basics, but for a lot of things you're not going to need to know the Pythagorean theorem. Or any confusing stuff. It's like sure maybe it's nice to know, but there's a lot of stuff that's a lot more important than math. It's like, they were frickin... I'm not going to say the words I was going to say. They were idiots, though. They are not smart."