The Most Pretentious Story Ever Told

After I post an entry in my journal, I typically re-read it a few times and make changes. Nobody probably notices, but in the week after it is first posted typos are fixed, jokes added, sentences rephrased. Just now I was re-reading an entry from several days ago, and added a joke about The Sound and the Fury. That's a pretentious joke to make, and it reminded me of the following story.

(This story does not show me in a flattering light. It will likely disgust and repel many of you, and I am fully aware that many who read this may never look on me sympathetically again. So let me try to balance the story with this statement- I haven't finished a novel in the last six months. Every time I pick a book up, I read three chapters and then get distracted by something else. Like Playstation 2 or the Daily Show.)

The summer after my freshman year of college I got together with two friends, Jocelyn and Brendan are their names, and decided to form a book club. This was not a book club in the usual sense, where a group of people all read the same book and get together to discuss it afterwards. Rather, this was a club that turned the reading of literature into a kind of sport. We would gather every so often at someone's house, frequently Jocelyn's, and then brag to each other about what each of us had finished since the last meeting, in an attempt to make the other members feel stupid. The person who most often came out on top was Brendan.

That year between early June and mid-August, my friend Brendan read thirty books of literary merit, if you include the Harry Potter books, which he did and we didn't. Brendan reads amazingly fast, and every time our club met he had finished not just one new book, but several. If I had finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, he had read The Crying of Lot 49 and The Tin Drum. If I came prepared to talk about Slaughterhouse 5, he had The Maltese Falcon, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and As I Lay Dying (which he apparently read in one night).

Sometime around July 4th, Jocelyn and I began to grow bitter, and by the middle of that month we had devised a plot against him. We decided to both read Anna Karenina, without him. We would then discuss it at one of our meetings, thereby humbling him.
Reading the book took a long time, and once it was read we were anxious to unveil our plot to the now nearly unbearable Brendan, who in the month that it took us to read Anna Karenina had finished In Cold Blood, Henderson the Rain King, A Widow for One Year, and The Dubliners, to name a few I can remember. When we did finally slam our books down on the table and laugh triumphantly in his face, it was only to have our victory spoiled by our own guilt. Watching a solitary tear roll down Brendan's cheek, I knew that I had betrayed a friend, and in the most ridiculous way possible.