Sunday, April 27, 2008

Cult Fiction Meme

Bikemonkey assailed me with another meme. This one demands the admission of guilt in reading cult fiction titles as determined by the British Telegraph newspaper. They define cult fiction as:

books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all with the formula " whacko"; books our children just won’t get…
If I've read the title, it's listed in bold. If I started but gave up, it's in italics. Unfortunately, memes don't go very far beyond me. None of the bloggers I ever tag ever put anything up, so I'm not going to try sending this one on. But since I like to read, here's my list. Does anyone think I should definitely read a title that I haven't touched?

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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 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)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

That puts me at reading 13 and for some reason, not finishing 4. Okay, enough of that. On to studying inflammatory bowel disease.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Jonathan Livingston Seagull is next on your list my friend.