Monday, October 06, 2008
Monday Morning Meme
I just found this list at Samulli's Everybody Lies, who got it from Puss Reboots, who got it from Bibliobibuli, who in turn found it at the site of The Telegraph. The 50 best cult books. Here's how the Telegraph defines cult books:
Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.
Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon.
Well, whatever the definition, what we have here is a list. And I just love lists.
Sharon Bakar at Bibliobibuli had the idea to see which ones she’s read and because I’m curious I will do the same.
The books I have read are bold, the ones in my TBR pile are in italics.
* Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
* The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
* A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
* Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
* The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
* The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
* Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
* The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
* The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
* The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
* Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968) --I've read a sequel to this
* A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
* Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
* The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
* Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
* The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
* Dune by Frank Herbert (1965) --Camden's been nagging me to read this
* The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
* The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
* Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
* The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
* The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
* Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
* Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
* The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
* I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
* If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
* Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
* Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
* The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
* Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
* The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
* The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
* No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
* On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
* The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
* The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
* The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
* The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám translated by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
* The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
* Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
* The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
* Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
* The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
* The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
* Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
* Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
* To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)
Interesting list. I've only read 14, with 3 more in my TBR pile. Six of the ones I've read were for classes.
Categories: Meme
Labels: random memes
