Cocktail Party Survival. Ever been at a cocktail party where a bunch of morons are going on and on, dropping words like "memetics" and saying "critical-this, critical-that", and no one can understand them? Well, now you can hold your own in the battle of pretentious knowledge just by reading a handful of well-selected books.
The Story of Art
First off, you're going to need to know a thing or too about art. EH Gombrich's book, though flawed by wrongly presenting art as a strict teleology, is still a very solid and comprehensive work that will introduce you to the canonical works in European art. And all of the things Gombrich tells you not to do (like muttering "wonderful chiaroscuro" whenever you see a Rembrandt)...do them!
Understanding Media
This classic 1960s work made "media" the popular term it is today. You should read it, because it's an important and foundational work that explores the way changes in media have influenced (and will continue to influence) the way we perceive society and even the way we think. Of course, you won't understand this book. No one does. But don't let that stop you: just say "Marshall McLuhan" and start talking about "Hot" and "Cold" media--it's like a secret handshake that lets people know you're part of the intelligentsia.
Literary Theory: An Introduction
If you're serious about being a hotshot, a superficial knowledge of literary criticism is a must. Read this book to pick up some of the lingo ("context", "hegemonic discourses", "deconstruction", "authorial intent is meaningless", etc.) and the names (Foucault, Derrida, etc.). Then, the key is to apply literary criticism to things that aren't literary at all: call movies and paintings "texts", while discoursing about the ontological ambiguities of this or that pair of tennis shoes.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
T.S. Kuhn's seminal work that made "paradigm" the catch-phrase it is today. The book is actually clearly written and very interesting. (It examines various scientific revolutions, from the Copernican switch from Heliocentric to Geocentric to the Michaelson-Morley experiment. After reading this book, whenever you see a new invention you like, you'll be able to say: "This represents a paradigm shift of Kuhnian proportions!"
Dialectic of Enlightenment
Contains Horkheimer and Adorno's marvelous description of a "Culture Industry", which describes the means by which American entertainment destroys our free will, making us hopelessly trapped consumers with no higher aspirations than shiny white teeth and freedom from bodily odor. Movies, televison, magazines, music and the like: they teach us the rules, and the rules rule us! A great segue into critiques of our own society, though we all know we like it just fine...
Harry Potter
Now, prove you don't take yourself to serioudly by being conversant with the ins and outs of our period's dominant children's fantasy series. But make sure to weave in your motifs and tropes from your literary-critical studies as you chat about life at Hogwarts, how great Griffendor is, and how unfortunate it was that everyone at the cocktail party was a Muggle. And you need to make sure to criticize Harry Potter: "There are no strong female characters. The only major girl character is Hermione, and she's just a nerd whose knowledge does her no good, and she's always being rescued by Harry. The book is just another contribution to our society's hegemonic discourse of male domination."
The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins' famous work which describes a provocative worldview where all living things--ourselves included--are simply vehicles which serve the interests of their genes, mercilessly fighting to propogate. If you're short on time, skip to the end and read about memes ("memory genes"), the most interesting part of the book. Dawkins suggests that ideas themselved can be described as containing and passing around these memes, and the fittest memes surive out there in the jungle of ideas. No one really knows a good practical use for the concept of memes (yet), such as how to model their behavior, but it sure is a fun word to say.
The Phenomenon of Man
Expresses Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's rather strange idea that all mankind is converging in the "noosphere" to reach the "omegapoint" and create a collective super-consciousness. Now, look at this book, reading "noosphere" as the Internet, and you've got yourself a conversation!
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