Comments on: Dianetics is one of them, ho ho.

Dianetics is one of them, ho ho.

Artw — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:17:01 -0800

50 best cult books from The Telegraph.

By: Artw

Artw — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:21:56 -0800

I suspect many of them are on the theiving list.

By: RavinDave

RavinDave — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:28:44 -0800

ooo-oo ... that's kinda depressing how many of these I've read. Guess I just have Bohemian tastes.

By: yhbc

yhbc — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:33:23 -0800

Lord of the Rings seems to be a pretty big omission.

By: smackwich

smackwich — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:33:50 -0800

No VALIS, No illuminatus!

By: afx237vi

afx237vi — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:36:24 -0800

I swear this list gets re-published about once a month in British newspapers, rotating between the Telegraph, the Independent, the Times and the Guardian.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:37:36 -0800

No X... but Y!

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:39:39 -0800

Iron John... heh, I'd completely forgot the 'Be a real man by running round the woods naked and hitting a drum' movement.

By: amyms

amyms — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:40:23 -0800

Wow, I have over half of these on my bookshelves. For several of them, I don't really get how they're considered "cult books" (e.g. To Kill A Mockingbird is a beloved mainstream classic), but I feel very cool and edgy now.

By: adipocere

adipocere — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:42:33 -0800

I either own or have read a disturbing percentage of the novels on this list. Wrong castle book, though. We Have Always Lived in the Castle would have been the appropriate choice. And To Kill a Mockingbird, really? I hate to bust up the Telegraph's dreams (like an old chiffarobe), but the book is impossible to escape in the United States, to the point where I find discarded copies of it in random locations. If it was at some point a cult book, I think it's now elevated to the status of State Religion.

By: mattoxic

mattoxic — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:43:46 -0800

I'm not going to go into this link, purely based on the Telegraph's shiteful 50 best crime writers link from a couple of months ago. If Cracked did the 50 best cult books, well, that'd be different.

By: matteo

matteo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:44:34 -0800

No Last Exit to Brooklyn, no Fight Club?

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:57:37 -0800

We were assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. Edgy.

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:59:33 -0800

THe Naked and the Dead by Mailer changed by life when I read it, as did Communion by Whitley Strieber. My life has since changed back.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:59:51 -0800

That said, the description of The Celestine Prophecy as (paraphrasing) "watching Tomb Raider while a stoned hippie babbles nonsense in your ear" goes a long way toward redeeming this list.

By: ersatz

ersatz — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:03:25 -0800

They make The Catcher in the Rye sound like a guilty pleasure. More like a guilty meh, when I read it at 15.

By: PeterMcDermott

PeterMcDermott — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:09:04 -0800

I swear this list gets re-published about once a month Invariably to coincide with Waterstone's current promotion on so-called 'life-changing reads'. Pepsi Blue, imo.

By: dances_with_sneetches

dances_with_sneetches — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:19:59 -0800

Among books I read deserving of cult status and not on the list. Valis by Philip K. Dick Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito There is practically a cult around Homicide: Year on the Killing Street, non-fiction but the Rosetta Stone of modern police fiction.

By: owhydididoit

owhydididoit — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:26:11 -0800

What a curious collection. Some of them I'm just shy of whacko for, others are completely unfamiliar to me. But Dianetics? Now that's cult lit.

By: octothorpe

octothorpe — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:31:22 -0800

kittens for breakfast: "We were assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird in eighth grade. Edgy." Same here. Also: The Stranger, Sidhartha, Catcher in the Rye. Maybe my high school was a cult!

By: TheophileEscargot

TheophileEscargot — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:36:46 -0800

I scored 15 definites and two possibles. (I definitely waded through a couple of Ayn Rands at some point, and I distinctly remember starting "The Catcher in the Rye" and thinking "this is pretty dull"). It mentions "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov which I've heard about from a few people and was thinking of reading... is that any good? Intelligible to a non-Russian?

By: CheeseDigestsAll

CheeseDigestsAll — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:48:11 -0800

I don't get their definition. I'd define a cult book as one that where people define part of their lives to some degree by whether they've read it or not. So books like The Fountainhead, Lord of the Rings (not on the list), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Teachings of Don Juan, make sense, but some of them seem silly. Jonathon Livingston Seagull? Really? I know it was madly popular, but I think in the same way that All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarden is, and that didn't make their list. Labyrinths? I think Borges is great but are there people out there who believe in the aleph?

By: three blind mice

three blind mice — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:55:22 -0800

Utterly depressing to see Naomi Kline's "No Logo" next to Kerouac's "On the Road." And no Book of Mormon. Strange.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:02:18 -0800

I think the title of the article is proof that they just publish these lists so people will dicker about them online. Given how damning some of these reviews are (and rightly so: it's especially satisfying to see Zen blah blah Maintenance taken down a notch) they clearly don't intend for these to be the "best" of anything. But if they just owned up to being arbitrary and called it "A list of 50 cult books we happened to think of before our deadline," nobody would blog about their favorites being left out. But fuck it, I'll play along anyway: The real cult Salinger book, when I was in high school, was Franny and Zooey. Catcher in the Rye was what you had to read in ninth grade — they made us write essays about what, exactly, the ducks symbolized and so on, and after that you couldn't earn many badass points by liking it. Or, to put it another way, I had Catcher recommended to me by a chain-smoking English teacher one semester from retirement, and F & Z recommended by the cute redhead who sat next to me, so which one do you think I was gonna spend the next four years carrying around and dogearing all the pages?

By: inoculatedcities

inoculatedcities — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:07:17 -0800

Frederick Exley's excellent A Fan's Notes should be near the top but it isn't even mentioned. It's a better book than most on this list too. Lame.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:10:35 -0800

(Also, CDA, you've been hanging out with the wrong stoners. Some people believe in Borges. Lift up your right hand when you read that last sentence, and say believe in your best holy-roller voice, and you'll get the general idea.)

By: gaspode

gaspode — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:24:17 -0800

It mentions "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov which I've heard about from a few people and was thinking of reading... is that any good? Intelligible to a non-Russian? I thought it was excellent, FWIW.

By: Clay201

Clay201 — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:27:06 -0800

Do you often feel unhappy? Depressed? Ill at ease with others? You will if you read this. I enjoyed these four sentences.

By: crazylegs

crazylegs — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:27:24 -0800

Walden.

By: mygothlaundry

mygothlaundry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:28:13 -0800

27 out of 50; I'm going to have to relinquish my standing in the cult. Still, yeah, I don't get the inclusion of To Kill a Mockingbird either (or Catcher in the Rye for that matter, Franny & Zooey is what divides the Salinger cultists from the assigned books list people) and where, where are the Illuminatus trilogy and the Cosmic Trigger and, hell, the Book of the Subgenius? Those were the ones that changed my life in college and they're blissfully culty.

By: mygothlaundry

mygothlaundry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:29:53 -0800

after only skimming the comments before posting, and then going back, heh, nebulawindphone! Yeah, Franny & Zooey.

By: stet

stet — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:37:26 -0800

Women should taste their own menstrual blood to reconcile themselves to their bodies, declared Germaine Greer in the seminal feminist text of the 1970s. Wow, "seminal" is *so* not the word I would have chosen there. Patriarchisterical!

By: CheeseDigestsAll

CheeseDigestsAll — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:38:06 -0800

Oh, I believe in Borges (I'm writing Don Quixote as we speak), I just don't see anyone running around trying to convert people to Librarianism the way Rand's acolytes try to convert you to Objectivism

By: docpops

docpops — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:38:59 -0800

inoculatedcities - I haven't heard anyone mention him in years. I couldn't agree more.

By: Bookhouse

Bookhouse — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:56:19 -0800

That said, the description of The Celestine Prophecy as (paraphrasing) "watching Tomb Raider while a stoned hippie babbles nonsense in your ear" goes a long way toward redeeming this list. I read that book while all the hoopla was going on, and I put it down about 25 pages in convinced that the entire world, by pretending the book was worth a damn, was fucking with me. Perhaps Mockingbird is less popular in England? And as for Lord of the Rings, any book responsible for a billion-dollar movie franchise is officially "out of the cult".

By: empath

empath — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 09:58:53 -0800

nthing Illuminatus! and Lord of the Rings. Also the fact that I've read a disturbing amount of these.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:02:27 -0800

Oh, I believe in Borges (I'm writing Don Quixote as we speak), I just don't see anyone running around trying to convert people to Librarianism the way Rand's acolytes try to convert you to Objectivism Actually, now that you put it that way, I kind of wish they would. It would make that spot on campus where they shout The Truth at you until the crosswalk signal changes a lot more interesting. Right now, the objectivists, the LaRouche whatsits and the First Church of Gory Abortion Posters seem to have a lock on it. It's enough to make me miss my old school, where there were some comically sincere Maoists in the rotation who were at least good for a laugh.

By: willmize

willmize — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:02:48 -0800

Yay for Ignatius J. Reilly, and yay for Paul Atredies, but no Owen Meany?

By: inoculatedcities

inoculatedcities — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:09:50 -0800

docpops - Despite my perpetual evangelizing on behalf of Exley (and that book in particular) it still seems almost nobody I meet has ever heard of him. Yardley's slim biography a few years back seemed to rejuvenate interest in him but that faded quickly. I found it in 9th grade in a used book store, started it with zero expectations and was reduced to trembling awe by its prose. No joke. Speaking of belligerent assholes who can really turn the words, where's Richard Yates on this list too? Half of me can't wait for the Revolutionary Road movie to come out this year because I'm sure Oprah will make it a book-of-the-month or something and Yates will finally get what he was always denied (a huge readership), but the other half of me is dreading how much the film is going to suck.

By: docpops

docpops — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:16:55 -0800

I found it in 9th grade in a used book store, started it with zero expectations and was reduced to trembling awe by its prose. No joke. Freshman year at college. I thought the cover was interesting. But hell if I can find anyone else that's read it, and like one reviewer has said, you need to be careful who you inflict it on.

By: TheDonF

TheDonF — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:21:07 -0800

Nothing on Ian Astbury or Billy Duffy? I've been lied to.

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:24:27 -0800

Like many others, I thought this was gonna be a list of non-fiction books about cults, and I clicked on it to see if Monkey On A Stick: Murder, Madness, and the Hare Krishnas was included. But it wasn't, and it wasn't. But it's still an amazing, appalling read.

By: fixedgear

fixedgear — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:24:29 -0800

Makin' a list, checkin' it twice...

By: The Card Cheat

The Card Cheat — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:26:58 -0800

> I read that book while all the hoopla was going on, and I put it down about 25 pages in convinced that the entire world, by pretending the book was worth a damn, was fucking with me. Word. See also: Da Vinci Code, The and John, Iron.

By: symbioid

symbioid — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:29:47 -0800

VALIS fershure... I'm a huge fan of McKenna's "Archaic Revival", though I don't know if that really counts. Admittedly, that's more a collection of interviews and some excerpts of articles, etc... But that's gotta be pretty cultish.

By: Camel of Space

Camel of Space — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:32:18 -0800

No Neuromancer? You've got to be kidding me.

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:39:16 -0800

What a shit list. How are Slaughterhouse Five, The Bell Jar, Catch-22, The Catcher in the Rye, The Celestine Prophecy, The Fountainhead, Johnathan Livingston Seagull, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Stranger, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or To Kill a Mockingbird cult books in any sense? If it's sold millions of copies and any random person on the street has probably heard of it, it's not a cult book. Fuck, if it's used in highschools across the nation, it's not a cult book.

By: nebulawindphone

nebulawindphone — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:52:27 -0800

Of course, the problem with putting together a list of cult-cult books is that they are, by definition, obscure up until you meet that guy who lends you his copy. Unless you've got double agents in every club, scene, movement and school of thought, you're not gonna know what most of them are. Fortunately, I've got the rest of Metafilter, which is almost as good. Next paycheck I'm bringing this thread to the bookstore.

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 10:59:34 -0800

By: jack_mo

jack_mo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:02:40 -0800

Fuck, if it's used in highschools across the nation, it's not a cult book. Well, I read most of those when I was a kid, not in school, but because they were the exact opposite of the stuff we were given to read in school. (Seriously, Fear & Loathing is a set text in American high schools? Must take the edge off the 'Man, I'm a dangerously hip 13 year old! Woo! Drugs!' frisson a bit, that.) It seems to me that their definition of cult is "books people read in their teens and rather like". Also, Franny & Zooey is defo the Salinger cult book (I re-read it recently, with some trepidation - fearing the 'Oh dear, it's actually a bit mince'/On The Road re-read effect - but it's still pretty great.)

By: sonic meat machine

sonic meat machine — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:10:19 -0800

I picked up dhalgren on a whim one day in my college bookstore and sat down in my dorm room to read it. It had an interesting premise but I found Delaney's prose unlikeable, somehow fundamentally offensive to my sensibilities. I threw it across the room. It exploded against the cinderblock wall, leaves falling like autumn. That'll teach me to preview. Stupid bbcode.

By: mygothlaundry

mygothlaundry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:40:31 -0800

Is Dhalgren on the list? Make it 28 for me then. I loved that book. Still do, actually.

By: peacheater

peacheater — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 11:55:24 -0800

I totally agree with their description of The Fountainhead: Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama... Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. Ha.

By: meech

meech — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:02:09 -0800

I've just started If On A Winter's Night, of which they write: A book composed of the first chapters from other invented books. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere. Way to kill my buzz. Also The Telegraph have got this "list on a website" thing wrong - it should be at least 5 pages to click through, to read it all. Amateurs.

By: nosila

nosila — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:03:13 -0800

I just saw Master and Margarita as a puppet show at the fabulous Mum Puppettheatre in Philadelphia. They're currently doing a production of Animal Farm, which thankfully did not make it onto this apparently arbitrarily-compiled list. Though I haven't read the book yet, that puppet show put it near the top of my list. It was 3 hours long and had 2 actors that played over 100 characters.

By: sonic meat machine

sonic meat machine — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:04:47 -0800

No, mygothlaundry. I just think it should be.

By: Artw

Artw — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:07:48 -0800

They're currently doing a production of Animal Farm, which thankfully did not make it onto this apparently arbitrarily-compiled list. Now, see, in the UK Animal Farm *IS* something you read at school.

By: empath

empath — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:17:08 -0800

I definitely got the exact same you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me vibe reading the DaVinci Code that I had reading the Celestine Prophecy some years before.

By: inoculatedcities

inoculatedcities — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:33:09 -0800

docpops - Was it the 80's Vintage Contemporaries paperback edition? I love how all of the books in that imprint look. They put out mostly great books too: Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, Don DeLillo, etc. Come to think of it a significant percentage of my personal library is composed of 80's Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks...

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:41:32 -0800

Put six Nietzscheans in a room and it ought to be a bloodbath; except, since they're all nancies who fancy themselves as Supermen, there wouldn't be one. Nietzsche was brave and mad enough to kill God: but look what happened to him. His acolytes are, largely, less brave. This brought a smile to my mug.

By: KokuRyu

KokuRyu — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:01:43 -0800

Anyone here read "Zoo Station: Adventures in East and West Berlin" by Ian Walker? That was a great book I read at the age of 23 just before I went overseas and stayed away for ten years. It came along at a perfect time in my life. I had just graduated from university with a Creative Writing degree, and was working in my home town as a short order cook, smoking a lot of dope and listening to Shoegazers. Or Congo Journey/No Mercy, by Redmond O'Hanlon. Anybody read that? That is one incredible book that changed me, if only for a few years.

By: docpops

docpops — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:21:11 -0800

inoculated: yeah. I can't remember how I ended up in that line of reading. I was living in Durham in college and I think I discovered that a lot of the stuff Vintage was publishing was really appealing to the state of mind I was in. There seemed to be a lot of really quality stuff written by vaguely iconoclastic misfits in their line. Barry Hannah, Richard Russo were some others I read. It was sort of like a second stage of the kind of epiphany I had when I picked up Vonnegut in HS. Books were sort of like wine bottles - daunting because I knew the odds of whatever I picked up being appealing weren't huge. So the Vintage line was pretty key, even tough I really had no idea if it was really quality literature or repackaged tripe.

By: ten pounds of inedita

ten pounds of inedita — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:26:06 -0800

Way to kill my buzz. For what it's worth, the critic is wrong. It's a great book, and you'll love it.

By: docpops

docpops — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:32:24 -0800

and also, ic, I see you did some work on Saunders. He's my literary crush of the 'oughts, after reading CommComm in the New Yorker. I'm still finding him a bit inconsistent but some of his stories are going to be classics.

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:35:41 -0800

These aren't cult books. Warlock by Oakley Hall is a cult book. You Can't Win by Jack Black is a cult book. These are cult books for people who are afraid to read.

By: rtha

rtha — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:09:38 -0800

Or Congo Journey/No Mercy, by Redmond O'Hanlon. Anybody read that? Yeah. It was making the rounds at Lonely Planet when I worked there. I hated it. Can't even remember exactly why, anymore - it had to do with his tone, I think. Sometimes I think about giving it another try, since a bunch of people I like (and whose taste I respect) liked it, but maybe not. May I be the nth person to express surprise that To Kill a Mockingbird is a cult book? Re: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - read it in high school for a literature class. General consensus: guy was a wanker who was mean to his kid.

By: sour cream

sour cream — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:20:56 -0800

I like the sort-of-but-not-quite alphabetic order of the reviews.

By: lupus_yonderboy

lupus_yonderboy — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:31:39 -0800

Neuromancer isn't a "cult" book; it's a standard SF novel. As far as I know, there were never Neuromancer fan clubs or board games based on the book. You might eliminate Dick for a similar reason, and also because there isn't really one seminal book. I don't really like their inclusion of best-sellers. I mean, if everyone knows about it, it isn't a "cult" book, is it now? I'd x-out LOTR for that reason. Illuminatus! defines the category of "cult book". "No Logo", how is this a cult book? What about Mao's little red book (English translation)? Gah, what a stupid concept all told. "50 cult books".

By: jamjam

jamjam — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:51:47 -0800

Read 36 of these and consider almost all of them mainstream. Cult would be Arthur Bremer's Diaries, the Letters of Emily Dickinson (or D. H. Lawrence), Whitehead's Process and Reality, T. Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye, Ouspensky's Meetings with Remarkable Men, Grave's Greek Myths, Keuls' Reign of the Phallus, N. O. Brown's Life Against Death and Love's Body, G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, Fuller's Synergetics, A Pattern Language, Saberhagen's Berserker books, A. O. Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, anything by Gertrude Stein or Laura Hobson Riding, Burgess' Clockwork Orange, Levi-Strauss' Triste Tropiques, Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism, Grunbaum and Shepherd's Tilings and Patterns, Flannery O'Connors letters, Key's Subliminal Seduction, Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind-- and so endlessly on.

By: kittens for breakfast

kittens for breakfast — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:55:23 -0800

Gah, what a stupid concept all told. "50 cult books". Good concept; halfassed execution.

By: Space Coyote

Space Coyote — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:01:52 -0800

When I started keeping score I barely made it ahead in having read more books on that list that they gave good reviews to vs. ones they've panned. I think they selected a definition of 'cult' that would cause the most readers to keep reading through the list, a list full of titles most readers will have never heard of would not have been finished by most of the readers.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:03:02 -0800

Of course for the average Torygraph reader Wisden is a cult book.

By: jokeefe

jokeefe — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:47:54 -0800

No Stranger in a Strange Land or In Watermelon Sugar, and nothing by Tom Robinson, seems odd, but then my working definition of "cult books" comprises what you might expect to find on the bookshelves of a sort-of literate hippie in 1975.

By: hototogisu

hototogisu — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 15:49:47 -0800

Every time a list like this appears I immediately think of Motorman. Has anyone here read it?

By: Crabby Appleton

Crabby Appleton — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:31:15 -0800

OK, I've been around long enough to know that there's nothing so wonderful that no one will hate it, but what, exactly, is wrong with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?

By: condour75

condour75 — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 18:52:18 -0800

Well there's a common thread here, it's maybe not just "cult book".. maybe it should be "top 50 books that someone between the ages of 16 and 22 might consider a dividing line between those who 'get it' and those who don't."

By: jason's_planet

jason's_planet — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:28:59 -0800

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974) Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he'd done Greek at school and knew what "arête" meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. Ouch.

By: TedW

TedW — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 19:45:35 -0800

At least they put the whole list on one page. Although any list that progresses from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Jonathan Livingston Seagull is just depressing.

By: DenOfSizer

DenOfSizer — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:07:06 -0800

No Joy of Sex? Shocking!

By: motownoni

motownoni — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:07:01 -0800

no silent terror

By: jfuller

jfuller — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 05:29:05 -0800

> Whitehead's Process and Reality... A. O. Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, Process and Reality has a cult following? Great Chain has a cult following? Where are the meetings? I hope they're not both on Tuesday nights.

By: naju

naju — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:04:44 -0800

No Audacity of Hope?

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:44:30 -0800

maybe it should be "top 50 books that someone between the ages of 16 and 22 might consider a dividing line between those who 'get it' and those who don't." Very well said. I was looking at the list & thinking that around half of them are standard, canonical books that every liberal arts student or "thinking person" on the planet has read by age 21 - eg Vonnegut, Heller, Salinger, Camus, Hesse, Wolfe, Woolf, Kerouac, Calvino, Borges, Fitzgerald, etc. The other half are the kinds of books that would have you backing off quietly but very quickly if you saw them on a date's bookshelf - like The Fountainhead, Iron John, The Celestine Prophecy, Dianetics or Zen & the Very Bad Course in Ordinary General Philosophy. (and The Master & Margarita is nothing short of pure, unadulterated genius, TheophileEscargot. no requirement to be Russian to understand it)

By: jamjam

jamjam — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:24:13 -0800

OK, I've been around long enough to know that there's nothing so wonderful that no one will hate it, but what, exactly, is wrong with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Zen isn't a favorite, in fact it has ratcheted away from me through a series of rooms so long ago I can no longer remember which of the many decor-matching colors it has appeared in my copy actually was (pale green?), but I consider it horrifying and extremely moving even so, a book that distills a melancholy bile sufficient to darken my outlook a bit to this day. Pirsig was (and no doubt remains) a schizophrenic, and the essential drama of Zen is the struggle of a once prodigiously brilliant and very promising young student of biochemistry to raise himself up out of the abyss of catatonia and paranoid delusion his pitifully unequal encounter with that enormous unheeding juggernaut of a disease had precipitated him, using only a splintered wreckage of schoolboy philosophy, and as much contact with the material world as trying to fix broken down motor bikes can afford. He ultimately fails to reconstitute his mind or sanity, and to me resembles nothing at the end of the book so much as one of those cormorants which has dived unwittingly into a spill of heavy crude we have all seen standing oil-soaked, shivering and forlorn on a blackened beach. Neither the book nor Pirsig himself can be blamed for the amazingly silly worship they inspired, in my opinion. In 1979 his son Chris, the one who went on the motorcycle trip with him, was stabbed to death outside the San Francisco Zen Center.

By: Unicorn on the cob

Unicorn on the cob — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:22:41 -0800

No Robert Anton Wilson, no Aleister Crowley... not even The Cold Six Thousand? Fail.

By: Unicorn on the cob

Unicorn on the cob — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 10:23:09 -0800

I also agree with everyone upthread surprised about no PKD.