50 best cult books

[The Straight Story]

(full list at link)

Our critics present a selection of history's most notable cult writing. Some is classic. Some is catastrophic. All of it had the power to inspire

What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition: 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 “<Author Name> whacko”; books our children just won’t get…

50 books that changed our lives

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.

Cult books are somehow, intangibly, different from simple bestsellers – though many of them are that. The Carpetbaggers was a bestseller; Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a cult.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/04/26/nosplit/boanotherlist126.xml&DCMP=ILC-traffdrv07053100

[realisticphish]

1. cool

nice resource

[rpannier]

2. Interesting read

Thanks for sharing

Some of these I've never heard of.

I'll have to check some of these out

[ColbertWatcher]

3. LOL Dianetics!

LOL!

[ColbertWatcher]

4. LOL Ayn Rand's Fountainhead! LOL

[MilesColtrane]

11. Atlas Shrugged, Shuddered, and Collapsed in a Sweaty Heap.

And so did Alan Greenspan, according to rumor.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

13. lol!

:rofl:

[ColbertWatcher]

14. I can understand young people reading Ayn Rand...

...as part of a class, but I can't imagine anyone admitting it after graduating.

Oh, and Angelina Jolie is starring in a movie version of Atlas Shrugged.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

16. I read all of Rand's books by my junior year in high school and it didn't stop me

from becoming an anti-war flower child.

Brad Pitt as John Gault????

:rofl:

[ColbertWatcher]

18. Yeah, I know...

...right now it's only rumour, but it's been a rumour for a while.

I think Brangelina finally got around to reading the crap they signed up for.

Oh, and good for you on becoming a flower child instead of a greedy, self-involved Objectivist asshole.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

30. lol! Yes! I read Rand and she didn't touch my soul!

Peace :)
PS... love your screenname, from one Colbert watcher to another
:hi:

[CBGLuthier]

5. Read about twenty of those

Think their description of Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenacne is wrong. Never saw the character as a hippy, more a beatnik if anything.

[Hardrada]

22. Yeah, I thought Pirsig wrote an honest book with some

excellent non-psychedelic insights. It's been in print forever but I don't know anyone who read his second book.

[greyl]

24. Now you do.

Well, you know of me, anyhow. ;)

[texastoast]

6. Skinny Legs and All

Who in their right mind wouldn't love escapees Dirty Sock, Spoon, and Can o' Beans?

"Early religions were like muddy ponds with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim."

[tkmorris]

45. Definitely in my top 5

But I am not sure it's really a cult book as it is defined above. Oh, and you left out Painted Stick and Conch Shell. They will be quite displeased.

:toast:

[texastoast]

50. Don't tell them I forgot

They might show up here.:yoiks:

[texastoast]

49. self-delete

[orleans]

7. what? no "johnny got his gun?" n/t

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

15. If that was on the list, I would have read 19 out 51! That was an incredible book.

[orleans]

19. yes it was. i still have an old copy--but it's so yellowed and musty

i can't stand to be near it.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

29. I have long since lost my copy in a move. I do have other books, boxes of them

that had been hibernating under my stairs for 20 years. My son's girlfriend moved in and she has had a ball going through the boxes, and many good ones are now in a pile, being read by her one by one. :)

[orleans]

34. how fun that she's reading them. do you two talk about the book?

has your son ever read them?

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

37. She is making her way through all of my Vonnegut's and she loves them. She hasn't

read one of my favorites yet, and I can't wait. Welcome To The Monkey House.
I read that when I was in my teens. It made me laugh out loud, hysterically so at times. I'll never forget my parents coming into my bedroom worried, thinking I had a nervous breakdown or something! :)

As to my son reading them? Ha! Even though I was an avid reader (I suffer from reader's block now after all the years on the Internet), and read to them when they were young, both of my sons don't enjoy reading at all. They take after their father who although college educated and a professional, only read comic books and the sports section of the newspaper.

[orleans]

38. my daugher loves to read but she won't go near all my vonnegut

books either (or my richard brautigan books! and she wouldn't read johnny got his gun--but, like i said before, it was smelly and musty.)

[RaleighNCDUer]

20. Or 'Stranger in a Strange Land'.

I don't think I knew ANYBODY who hadn't read it, when I was 16.

LOTR, either.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

28. OMG! I loved that book!

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. I'm disappointed - only read 14 of the 50

but there were several more I tried and couldn't get into: Gravity's Rainbow; Godel Escher Bach; Fountainhead - and a couple I know I read but for some reason just don't remember: Zen &...; Teachings of Don Juan (of course, that would have been in @76, and I don't remember much of '76).

[The Straight Story]

9. Godel Escher Bach is one of my favorites

Meant a lot to me growing up, and still does (as does Metamagical Themas).

[LeftishBrit]

31. I was never able to get into the first one; but I really like Metamagical Themas...

and Hofstadter's later book, "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies".

[nomorenomore08]

10. Wow, I am PATHETIC. At the age of 23 I've only read 3 of those.

Not saying which ones, because of all the obvious ones I haven't. Too embarrassing.

[RaleighNCDUer]

26. That's all right - you've got plenty of time and they'll be around.

And there are a great many more which are better than many on the list - I mean, I can understand why Dianetics is there, but nobody could ever call it a 'good' book and it is well worth missing.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

12. I've read 18 out of the 50. One of my favorites of the 18 is Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

Gorgeous prose.

Sentimental favorite as it was read to me with great love is The Prophet. It's interesting what the writer said about The Prophet

-Pocket-sized set of aphorisms that sound like they were written by a medieval monk but were actually the product of a Lebanese-American alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1931. The Prophet is a beautifully phrased exercise in pointing out the obvious but Sixties hippy kids loved it. SD

I read an excellent book that was a compilation of Gibran's correspondence to a dear woman friend/benefactor of his, Mary Haskell, the title is Beloved Prophet. There were also diary entries of her included.

The Gibran that I met through that correspondence was so far from what I imagined him to be after reading The Prophet, that I really believe that it was a product of "divine inspiration".

[Mojorabbit]

17. I love the Prophet

Every copy I have lent out over the years was never was returned. I have read 17 out of the 50 on the list. Some good titles to look into in the article.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

27. Friendship and Children are my favorite parts of The Prophet. :)

As to the books on the list..I didn't include the ones that I started to read and closed because they weren't worth reading to me.

[PufPuf23]

21. 24 out of 50 read

I see some books that don't belong on the list and others that could have been included such as:

Illuminatus!! RA Wilson
The Psychedelic Experience - Leary, Metzger, Alpert
Design with Nature - McHarg
Would have picked a different Vonnegut, say Cat's Cradle (but I like God Bless You Mister Rosewater better)
Something by Philip K Dick, say The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Magick in Theory and Practice - Crowley
The Fractal Geometry of Nature - Mandelbrot
Science and Sanity - Korbzybski
The Book of Enoch
TAZ - Hakin Bey
Walden - Thoreau
Origin of Species - Darwin
Rising Tide - Barry
I Ching
A Sand County Almanac - Leopold

lol I am a book junky.

[Hardrada]

23. LOTR? Narnia?

2001, A Space Odyssey (was a novel)

Quotations of Chairman Mao (now there was a BIG Sixties book!)

Oh and they forgot both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (real cult books if I may say so).

Howl! by Allen Ginsberg (which was also a famous court case).

[RaleighNCDUer]

25. Velikovsky - Worlds in Collision

The epitome of the cult book.

[LeftishBrit]

32. Of these, the one that probably influenced me the most was 'Testament of Youth"

I'd have been anti-war anyway; but this really brought a very strong and personal angle to it.

[Echo In Light]

33. No Philip K Dick, Harlan Ellison, or Herbert Marcuse?

:wtf:

[Lithos]

35. No Illuminati Trilogy?

Wow, what a lapse.

[kineneb]

36. read 5 from the list, but they did miss some great books

Chariots of the Gods
Hitchhiker's Guide
Holy Blood, Holy Grail
Siddhartha
Also Sprach Zarathustra (in the original German)


Missing, but are on my list:

Brave New World
1984
Silent Spring
Fahrenheit 451
Lord of the Rings
Lord of the Flies
works by H.P. Lovecraft
works by Rodger Zelazny, esp. the Nine Princes in Amber series

[alfredo]

43. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cleveland Amory said it had the best opening paragraph in modern literature. I've read this book three times.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude

http://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Solitude-Gabriel-Garcia-Marquez/dp/0060929790

[Echo In Light]

44. Yeah...such a list with no Orwell is odd

[KittyWampus]

47. Neil Gaiman

:)

[Hardrada]

39. Mein Kampf

by Adolf Hitler. A cult book if anything was.

[WCGreen]

40. The Bible

[WCGreen]

41. I read fifteen of them....

All but one before I had my first non-solo orgasm.

[dawgman]

42. wow I have read alot of those

But I think Phillip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" should be on there somewhere.

I also think Tom Robbins has a place as well as Chuck Pahalaniuk.

[uppityperson]

46. Good list of books. I almost didn't read this topic because of the "cult" bit.

Tired of reading about cults. Nice to see it is a list of good books. Thanks.

[fed_up_mother]

48. Being a teen back in the seventies, I've read too many of those LOL

Like... Jonathan Livingston Seagull. :hide:

But?

To Kill a Mockingbird a "cult" book? Maybe in Britain, but that book has made its way into contemporary classic literature - where it belongs.

[ashling]

51. How about

Chicken Soup for the right wing, white supremecist, homophobic,mysogenist, riot inciting radio talk show host without a soul?

That's gotta be on there somewhere.

:rofl: