While avoiding doing work for which I get paid, I was clicking my way around the interwebs and found this fun article about What Is Your Cultural Shame. Which classic cultural piece (in the form of a novel or film) are you most embarrassed to admit you’ve never read/watched? There’s a game involved called Humiliation. One gains points according to how many other players have read it. As for me…
Novels
Anything Russian. I’m extremely ashamed to admit that I’ve never read Nabokov (although I pretend otherwise), Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Pasternak. (I’m fixing the last one this summer, I swear.)
I’ve never read any of the beat writers, but I don’t feel so bad about that one because I feel like I need to be on acid and LSD while also being as drunk as humanly possible in order to truly appreciate their writing, and that’s just too much work.
Movies
I have never seen Grease, Gone With the Wind, Taxi Driver, Scarface, or Lawrence of Arabia.
Well, I actually feel a bit better for letting that out. I’m a fraud! I’m not really cultured!
What about you, dear reader(s)? What is your secret cultural shame?
Comments (1):
Even with it being required by every English and/or History department on the West Coast, I managed never to read Anne Frank.
And even more shameful, as I am a female, I never was able to get through either the novel or movie of Little Women. I always thought I had at least watched the entire movie, but upon recounting a scene in a conversation that somehow concerned this work, I determined that what I believed to be the movie Little Women was in fact Anne of Green Gables; hence why I never understood why Anne was fetching something for whooping cough when the plot of Little Women concerns one of them contracting scarlet fever (also, none of the characters in the story are named Anne)