15 Books Everyone Gets Wrong

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15 Books Everyone Gets Wrong

There is an enormous amount of trivia, facts, and general weirdness in the world. You just have to know where to look for it. If you are reading this, you probably have at least one person in your life that enjoys the company of trivia and factoids. It could be that you are that person, and perhaps you are reading this with a friend, or a family member, or maybe just yourself. It could be that you enjoy this list of interesting facts about our world, and hope to find in them a reason to live. Maybe you're searching for just one more fact to make your mind work overdrive. Or perhaps you are hoping that there will be something here that makes you feel less alone in this world. Or maybe, you're hoping there is something here that will make you laugh and have a good time, while you share these amazing facts with someone else.

Into the Wild

Into the Wild Like Kerouac before him, Chris McCand- less went off into the great unknown to find the meaning of life and completely failed, although in his case, it wasn't just spiritually. Не died a horrible death thanks to his undue focus on escaping the trappings of modern life and not enough research on how to actually do that, but that hasn't stopped tons of fans from embarking on their own jour- neys to the place where, it cannot be overstated, nature murdered his ass cold. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

BBC

The Jungle

The Jungle Upton Sinclair's behind-the-scenes peek at how the actual sausage is made was supposed to illustrate the horrors of American factory work under capi- talism, but instead of converting the country to socialism, it only led to spe- cific reforms of the meatpacking indus- try. Teddy Roosevelt, who was presi- dent at the time, dismissed Sinclair as a crackpot even as he enacted those re- forms. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

SCMP

On the Road

On the Road The whole point of On the Road was that Kerouac never found what he was looking for out there, but he made it sound so fun that he inspired a group of people he com- pletely hated as a traditional Catholic to drift similarly aimlessly. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

NPR

The Works of George Orwell

The Works of George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four was more about the power of language than censorship or surveillance, Animal Farm was more about the pitfalls of violent revolution than any particular political be- lief, Orwell himself was a staunch socialist, and no one on Twitter knows how to read. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

USA Today

Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland The favorite book of every high school senior with more than one lava lamp in the year of our lord 2022 was actually written by a huge dork who was mad about math. Although originally just a silly story told to a little girl he was maybe a little too friendly with, it even- tually became a satire of what Lewis Carroll, a mathematician by trade, saw as the introduction of nonsense rules and abstraction into the field. Basically, it's a book about how much algebra sucks. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

NPR

The Prince

The Prince Dictators have long been fans of Machiavelli, particu- larly The Prince, which would have no doubt tickled him senseless because he was very obviously making fun of them. Не was actually a big believer in democracy. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

NPR

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Thus Spake Zarathustra It's similarly easy to read about some great king daddy and master races of blond beasts of prey and think that's some Nazi shit right there, and that's not entirely unintention- al, but it wasn't Nietzsche who intended it. It was his sister, who edited his work after his death and happened to be a big fat Nazi. Her brother hated her and all her Nazi friends, and his idea of the ubermensch had more to do with individual moral determination than any particular skin color. In fact, he described the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the

LRB

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451 Thinking a story about actual book burning is about censorship is an easy mistake to make, but it turns out Brad- bury was thinking way more literally. According to him, Fahrenheit 451 is about the '50s television boom de- stroying interest in literature, but the misinterpretation is so pervasive that he was driven out of a UCLA lecture by people who kept telling him he was wrong about his own book. CRACKED NOW YOU KNOW

LA Weekly

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