Bike Monkey tagged me for the cult book theme and (sing it with me now) I always do as I’m told. This is a bit scary because I’m afraid I may have read a good number of these books. Then again, maybe their list isn’t hardcore enough for my tastes…
One’s I’ve read are in bold:
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) I’m with BikeMonkey, why is this cult?
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993) Oh no! here we go…
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) hated it, I swear
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) Great one!
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982) This one seriously screwed me up for a spell. Eco’s Foucalt’s Pendulum set me straight.
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) Yeah baby!
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) Might just be my favorite book.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774) Beautiful Book.
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) Another fav
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 didn’t get it…
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) Seriously, what is this doing here?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)
So, there you have it, and I’m left with this question: where is Nausea by Sartre?
JUNIORPROF 
You have to fix the 8 – close paren auto-emoticon feature…..it slays me every time.
Dianetics??? Srsly???? Please to explain.
Wow, what happened??
On Dianetics, how are you gonna know what these people are all about if you don’t read their bible? I know, for a fact, that they are loony (but maybe not as loony as the Holy Blood, Holy Grail authors).
At least the Bible is a good read what with all the smitin’ and begettin’. how’s dianetics? ’cause mostly what i know was that trippy “interview” with Cruise that was making the round a few months ago. you know, the one where he looked like he was dosed out of his mind….
Weird, does it not show up in your browser? Every time I load your page (from different OS’s, even), the 8 ) turns into a big smiley face with sunglasses. It’s pretty gagorific. Is this something I can fix at my end? Oh the mystery.
My time with Dianetics was confined to seeing the very funny “a very merry children’s scientology pageant” or something like that.
I actually bought Dianetics as a kid because it was always advertised between Saturday Night Live and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. I didn’t get very far – the whole thing about the reactive mind and not saying anything when a person is in a car accident or otherwise hurt triggered the bullshit detector in even my teenage mind.
Oh yeah, Fear and Loathing rules.
But you *must* read Confederacy of Dunces – bring it to Grand Cayman.
I’m tagging you for the shuffle meme…
(but because I can’t figure out how to put the link in the comment right now… just click on drdrA)