Cult Book Meme

Posted on May 9, 2008
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Yes an other meme since the last one I contributed to didn’t go anywhere. This one is from Adventures in Ethics and Science although she didn’t originate it.

Basically you have a list of famous books - many of which no one finishes. You bold the books you’ve finished. You italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. You leave alone the ones you never bothered with or haven’t got to you. Just to make it more interesting I’ll put asterisks beside the ones I want to get to. (Either make an other attempt or just make an attempt)


Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

A great book that I originally thought was far, far more ironic than I discovered it was. It’s one of those books in which my original apparent misreading was far more interesting than the more justified reading. Vonnegut is a far more cynical and depressed man than I originally thought. Once I read some of his other books I realized a lot that I thought was tongue in check as entailing it wasn’t true was quite the opposite. I never could quite read the book the same after that.

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)

I keep meaning to read this. I keep forgetting.

* The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)

I’ve heard this is a book that is much more poignant when you’re 16 than when you’re 40. So I don’t know if I’d like it. But almost everyone has read it so I really ought to.

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 )
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)

For some reason I’ve never read Roussea nor have I had any desire to.

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)

The one great book in the series. The sequel is good, but not great. They rapidly go downhill after that. Almost none of the rest I could even finish. Which makes me wonder why I bothered trying.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Much better read when you are in college. Like Monty Python it somehow doesn’t age as well. I suspect there’s just something about having mentally exhausted yourself cranking through a semester that makes Monty Python and Adams hilarious. I like Adam’s detective series better, truth be told.

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)

A friend at Los Alamos when I worked there told me that Atlas Shrugged and Don Quixote were the most influential books on his life. I read Atlast Shrugged with its ponderous run-on sentences and paragraphs and wished I had those hours back. Everyone says Fountainhead is better as literature than Shrugged. Maybe. But you’ll still never get me to read it.

*Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)

I’ve had this on my “to read” for longer than I care to admit. But the more deep I’ve gotten into technical philosophy the more I know I’ll be disappointed. I suspect this is one everyone should read in college though.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)

Horrible scholarship in the “connect the dots” style of thinking that Umberto Eco lampooned so well in Foucalt’s Pendulum.

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) — I totally want those two hours of my life back

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)

I read this for class in 7th grade. Even then it seemed a superficial treatment of various ideas.

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)

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time. I know about it and it is, of course, very much a product of its times. I suspect in these days where the generation it spoke to are now retiring it will have lost a lot of its thrust. I suspect anyone reading it should do a followup with Krakauer’s Into the Wild to see the other side.

*Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time. I’ve never been in the right mood. I loved the movie though and the character loosely based on Thompson from the early Doonesbury was pretty funny as well.

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 tr 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)

I read this at BYU for a religion class where one of the requirements was to read a book you’d always wanted to read but couldn’t justify while you were in college. You then had to write a report on it. It was very influential on me. At the time I was probably a mix between Bertrand Russell and Friedrich Nietzsche which, if you think about it, is a weird thing to be. As philosophy you’re better off reading his other stuff. But as literature it’s a pretty funny collection of poems and stories.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

I think when I read this is school it was when I first realized there was such a thing a racism.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Some interesting ideas but not as deep or as philosophical as it appears to many Freshmen who read it. I loved it in college. Mainly because I was just hitting my anti-philosophy stage. (Also why I read Nietzsche.

Comments

2 Responses to “Cult Book Meme”

This is ironic that you wrote that about hitchiker’s guide to the galaxy , cuz I’m reading it right now. It’s ironic because I’m still in college, and I just finished exhausting myself from an intense semester.

I was surprised how many were books I’ve never heard of. And how many of the ones I’ve read, I haven’t bothered to reread in the last 20 years.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
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)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
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)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

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