To Be a Hipster Is to Be Remarkably Provincial

There was a time when I thought Flavorpill’s Daily Dose e-mail was all right. Sure, there was the occasional annoying tone, the fact they never covered any of our books, and the hipper-than-thou sort of attitude. But still, it picked up where VeryShortList was before the New York Observer drove it into the ground bought it.

The Assigned Reading: Ultimate Hipster Reading List killed all those good vibes. Made me hope Flavorpill gets a virus right up it’s server’s motherboard. Reignited my hatred for hipsters. (Didn’t N+1 declare hipsters dead like five months ago? Fucking zombie hipsters are the worst.)

Here’s the lead for this “reading list”:

There are a million suggested reading lists out there, especially now that it’s the end of the year/decade/life as we know it. So how’s an aspiring literary hipster to know which books are most important in terms of street cred and general knowing-it-all-ness? We decided to go straight to the source, and to that end, we’ve collected a few of our favorite and most knowledgeable lit-hipsters’ own hit lists for your cred-building convenience.

Most of the books and stories suggested here are completely awesome, and we’re pretty confident that these people know what they’re talking about (most of them create some not-too-shabby literature themselves), so we suggest that the anti-hipsters among you might do well to read on too. After all, we mean hipster in the good way (this time).

Ugh. Dry heave. And if that bit wasn’t crappy enough, just look through the list of the “most important [books] in terms of street cred” that’s compiled here? Notice anything? Like the fact that every single one of these authors is American? (With the exception of Miranda July’s nod to Rilke and Keith Gessen’s selection of his sister, who is technically Russian, but writes in English, and has spent a significant portion of her life here.)

And wow is this list lily-white. Like blindingly so.

     Lessons learned:

1) Flavorpill is crap.

2) Hipsters—even literary ones—aren’t half as well-read as they think they are.

3) If I want to avoid simply being mean, I have to drink coffee before writing the first post of the day.