Cult Fiction Book Meme

John Lynch pulled a list of 50 “Cult Fiction’ books from The Telegraph which defined the category (in part) as follows.

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.

I enjoyed the 101 Books of Pretension Meme before so let’s take a run at this one.

The schema is simple, boldface books you’ve read and italics font books you started but never quite finished. Now, on to the list:

• 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) —paged through, more like a reference book, isn’t it?
• 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)– if by “cult” you mean, 10th grade reading assignment.
• 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)–hmm, when they say “cult” I guess they mean a real cult.
• 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)–cult? this sucker should be on the “ultimate pretension list” of books.
• 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 book report on this from an idiot in my 11th grade English class was….exceptionally literal let us say.
  
• 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)–snore. ok, someday I’ll take another run at it.
  
• 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)–wait..what? This is “canon”, not “cult” you English weebags!
  
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)–I started into this overrated claptrap musta been 6 or 7 times so it is vaguely possible I did in fact finish it. suck-o.

Alrighty then. Apparently I am not very “culty” in my reading. Ah well.

Let’s meme this sucker anyway. Thomas Robey, JuniorProf, Anonymoustache, drdrA and CoolAuntJanet consider yourself tagged. Anyone else wants to play, consider yourself tagged too.