CLOSE GQ Magazine placed the bible on a list called “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.” Veuer's Sam Berman has the full story. Buzz60 
 
 The Good Book is not so good, says GQ magazine. (Photo: Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images) 
 
 Well, it appears this group of scribes won’t be greeted very warmly at the Pearly Gates. 
 
 GQ magazine, a bible of “grooming” tips, gadget suggestions and style advice, has sparked a social media conflagration by calling the Christian Holy Bible “foolish, repetitive and contradictory” and placing it on a list of “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.” 
 
 “The Holy Bible is rated very highly by all the people who supposedly live by it but who in actuality have not read it,” novelist Jesse Ball writes in the magazine. “Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that man has ever produced.” 
 
 Instead, Ball recommends reading Agota Kristof's The Notebook calling it “a marvelous tale of two brothers who have to get along when things get rough.” 
 
 Also on the GQ list are such classics as The Catcher in the Rye, Lonesome Dove, The Old Man and the Sea, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Lord of the Rings. 
 
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 In an introduction to the piece, GQ editors attempted justify their choices. "We've been told all our lives that we can only call ourselves well-read once we've read the Great Books. We tried," the editors wrote. "We realized that not all the Great Books have aged well. Some are racist and some are sexist, but most are just really, really boring.” 
 
 Perhaps predictably, the provocative proclamation about the Bible brought instant ire from Christians. 
 
 "Even if you don't believe this is an inspired word of God, in the last 50 years 3.9 billion have read the book," Fox News religion contributor Father Jonathan Morris told Fox & Friends on Sunday. Morris also labeled the inclusion as “just foolish and a shame.” 
 
 .@fatherjonathan: It’s ‘foolish’ that the editors of GQ Magazine would claim that the bible is one of the most overrated books of all time pic.twitter.com/rY7vhbTWkx — FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) April 22, 2018 
 
 And evangelist Franklin Graham, in a post on Facebook, said that the Bible is “sharper than a double-edged sword. There’s nothing more powerful, and there’s nothing more needed by mankind than the Word of God.” 
 
 Graham suggested that the GQ editors need to read it again. “The subject of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is Jesus Christ. And one day soon, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord.” 
 
 On Twitter, a user called Bluestar called GQ “The Most Overrated Magazine Of All Time!” and said the choice was an “epic fail.” 
 
 Another poster, who identified himself as Eric Metaxas, also slammed the magazine. “If there is a person on the planet who cares what @GQMagazine has to say about literature, I'd love to meet that person,” said. “And pray for him.” 
 
 If there is a person on the planet who cares what @GQMagazine has to say about literature, I'd love to meet that person. And pray for him. https://t.co/xJlWfH4m5P — Eric Metaxas (@ericmetaxas) April 22, 2018 
 
 Meanwhile, Twitter user David D raged that “This Act by GQ is a total disgrace to the Christain (sic) Community.” 
 
 “I really don't think I'll be buying anymore GQ Mags,” he proclaimed. 
 
 I just heard GQ Magazine just Bashed the Bible!!! 
 
 The Bible is God's Holy Word. 
 
 I really don't think I'll be buying anymore GQ Mags. 
 
 This Act by GQ is a total disgrace to the Christain Community. — 🇺🇸 David D 🇺🇸 (@luckydbldd) April 22, 2018 
 
 And in perhaps the cruelest jab at the magazine, Tweeter Brian Houston declared that the Bible “is way more hip than GQ.” 
 
 Wow. What a way for GQ to show this irrelevance. The bible is way more hip than GQ. — Brian Houston (@BrianCHouston) April 23, 2018 
 
 GQ did not immediately respond to a request for a comment. 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2FcPKxa ||||| Author Mark Twain. (The Mark Twain House & Museum via AP) 
 
 The Mark Twain many Americans read about in textbooks is, more or less, a literary superman. He wears a white suit; he pals around with Ulysses S. Grant; he tosses off chestnuts profound (“Lincoln’s proclamation … not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also”) and ridiculous (“Always respect your superiors; if you have any”); he’s the man called America’s first modern celebrity. The creator of the now-controversial masterpiece “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” — love it or hate it — is cool, confident and collected. 
 
 But very different adjectives apply to the Twain seen in writings from 1865 and 1866 pieced together by scholars: broke and suicidal. 
 
 “If I do not get out of debt in three months — pistols or poison for one — exit me,” Twain wrote in 1865 in a little-known letter to his brother. The letter is among many works “recently uncovered, authenticated and promulgated upon the public,” as SFGate put it, at the University of California at Berkeley. 
 
 “He was in the middle of an identity crisis,” Bob Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, told SFGate, the sister site to the San Francisco Chronicle. “He was facing debt and had not embraced his talent. He was tormented by it. He was drinking too much and didn’t know what to do with himself. He thought humor was literature of a low order.” 
 
 
 
 Bob Hirst, the general editor of the Mark Twain Project, with a book of 1866 Sacramento Union newspapers at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley. (Jeff Chiu/AP) 
 
 Much of Twain’s writing in this period came in the form of “letters” — columns of about 2,000 words each written from his home in San Francisco to the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nev. As the Civil War ended, Twain filed these stories six days per week for $100 per month, as the Associated Press noted. But since the Enterprise’s files were destroyed and the paper ceased publishing in the 19th century — though it announced it would make a go of it again earlier this year — scholars have had to compile the work from reprints and other sources. They have 110 documents so far. 
 
 “We’ve reached the point where we’re willing to say, ‘We’ve done our homework, we’re ready to put this into a book,'” Hirst said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post, estimating that a volume would appear in about a year and a half. 
 
 The Twain on display here is no novelist, but a newspaper man still gearing up to write “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” let alone the nuanced “Huckleberry Finn.” He was a bit of a muckraker — or, at least, a troll — when it came to the San Francisco police department, for example 
 
 “Blackmail, corruption and bribery is the rule, and not the exception, among the municipal body, all of whom are … like so many shoplifters or highwaymen,” he wrote, as SFGate noted. “The correspondent suggests the necessity of hanging half the policemen.” 
 
 But the driest wit in American letters was already pretty arid. 
 
 “I could close one eye in an opera and tell ‘Traviata’ from ‘Trovatore,'” Twain wrote of a visit to the opera, as SFGate reported. “I began to acknowledge to myself that this was tolerably true — and finally I deliberately decided that it was entirely and unquestionably true.” 
 
 Twain wasn’t in San Francisco for long; he left on assignment for the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) in 1866, then traveled to Europe and the Middle East, where he completed “The Innocents Abroad,” published in 1869. 
 
 For Hirst, the San Francisco writings offer a glimpse of Twain before the white suit — when he was writing however he wanted about whatever he thought was interesting. Damn the consequences, because there weren’t any. 
 
 The river “pilot is his ideal because the pilot has no constituency,” Hirst said of Twain’s attitude at the time, born of his experiences on the Mississippi. “The minister, the writer — they have a constituency that they have to take care of and be cautious about. Really, toward the end of his career, he starts writing things and deliberately not publishing them.” 
 
 Indeed, Twain’s autobiography was not published until 100 years after his death, as the author wished. Twain’s early work is somewhat free of such artifice — of the sometimes exhausting sense that the author is always pulling his readers’ legs. After all, this is the man who stuck a plainly ridiculous note at the beginning of “Huckleberry Finn”: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” 
 
 “It’s very hard to know when you’re in touch with the real Mark Twain,” Hirst said.
– If you've ever found yourself struggling through a so-called "classic" book only to find yourself thinking, "How racist/sexist/boring," you're not alone. The editors of GQ, along with some current authors, have put together a list of 21 such books (technically 20, because one of them got two votes) that are simply outdated and should be struck from the "Great Books" canon. The list got itself mentioned on Fox & Friends last weekend, and not in a good way—it includes the Bible, which Jesse Ball calls "repetitive, self-contradictory, sententious, foolish, and even at times ill-intentioned," leading Fox News religion contributor Father Jonathan Morris to push back by calling its inclusion on the list "foolish," USA Today reports. Lots of social media users also decried the choice, and evangelist Franklin Graham said the editors "couldn't be more wrong." As for what else made the list, here's a sampling—along with the books the editors and the authors they spoke to think you should read instead: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: This is the book that got two votes. "Mark Twain was a racist. ... He was a man of his time, so let's leave him there," writes Tommy Orange. Instead, he suggests reading The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis; Caity Weaver suggests Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.