Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Beachwood Reporter’s Hipster 101 post on what you can’t read if you don’t want to be a snotty urbanite, combined with a lively discussion thread at Chicagoist, has me realizing there’s pretty much nothing I can read on the bus without marking myself as an unfortunate cultural stereotype. The Man With the Golden Arm is out (“only for Chicago hipsters”); I wonder if The Last Carousel, which I just purchased, is safe. John Kennedy Toole’s classic A Confederacy of Dunces is similarly verboten because the main character disdains (god forbid) pop culture, although Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly is apparently safe ’cause there’s a movie. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is now nonhipster for the same reason. “Wonderous, glorious” books are for snobs.
The solution, I think, is old-school book covers, so I can read my book and not shatter everyone’s fantasy of how cool their city is.
