How does one do this, anyway?

[tigerfort]

So, I offer a prospective LJ-meme for people to consider.

In some strange parallel universe, you have just been selected to perform a rather unusual task: you must choose a book to be utterly expunged from history. (You don't have to do the expunging, just choose the book.) There is a condition: you aren't allowed to delete a totally unimportant book that's been forgotten anyway - the book must be something widely considered a 'classic'; that is, one that lots of people have read (or at least heard of and felt they should have read), and is felt to be in some way 'significant'.

What classic book (fiction or nonfiction) do you choose to retcon out of reality, and why?

(Answers welcome either here or as posts on your own journal in the hope of spreading!)

(I'll post my personal answer tomorrow; I do have one ready:)

Comments

[damerell]

Atlas Shrugged, because then I will never meet people who've read it and think it's the best thing ever.

I was going to say the Bible / Koran / Torah / etc but frankly I want a pox on all their houses and can't pick one.

[tigerfort]

Seems fair. If you take the Torah, that will erase the Bible and Koran as well, of course. I had (see new post) wondered about that, but the problem that struck me is the lack of any way to get back if the replacement turns out to be even worse.

[rustica.livejournal.com]

I choose Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, for being unmitigated unpleasantness which adds not a single positive thing to the human experience.

[segh.livejournal.com]

Catcher in the Rye. Teenagers can do angst on their own, they don't need a book to tell them how.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

What happens if we delete a book that influenced many other books? Would there be an enormous cascade effect as all those books ceased to exist, too, or would they remain as mystifying orphans, prompting bitter wars between scholars attempting to explain multiple simultaneous appearances of, say, halflings and magic jewels and epic quests to destroy dark lords?

If everything that depends on the book is also deleted, then in the interests of a truly interesting alternative history scenario, I'd be tempted to delete something like the Bible, since Western (and world) history and culture would be transformed beyond recognition. However, I'd like to be able to observe it from the outside as a historian, and press Undo after I've seen enough.