Friday, April 25, 2008

Cult fiction meme

BikeMonkey tagged me with the cult fiction meme; apparently there is this list of 50 'cult fiction' books compiled by The Telegraph, and one has to list the ones one has read in bold and list those that one started but never finished in italics.

Before I get to that, something that caught my eye on the link BikeMonkey provided... I have a screencap.....click to enlarge if ya want...






"Some is classic. Some is catastrophic." WTF? Is our children learning? The Telegraph can has editurz?
Did Dubi-ya write this article? Maybe there is such a thing as cult grammar and I'm just not hip, man.

Anyways, here the list...bold, I have read; italics, I started and never finished.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) Belongs on an all time classic list, not this one.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)

A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)

Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) Haven't read this one, but cult fiction? WTF? Seems illogical, captain. I am detecting large quantities of bullshit in this sector.

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 (196 8)

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) Belongs on an all time classic list, not this one.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (196 8)

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 (194 8)

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) Belongs on an all time classic list, not this one.

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) Belongs on an all time classic list, not this one.

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)

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) How does this even approach being a cult fiction book? Belongs on an all time classic list, not this one.

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


This list did remind me that I need to get to it and read some books that I have been meaning to for a while.

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4 comments:

Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde said...

The use of "some" is interesting, but I think it refers to "writing" in the previous sentence, rather than "books" in the title. And "writing," as a noun gerund, is automatically singular. But I agree that it looks awfully awkward, and one of the tenets of good writing is avoiding anything that makes the reader go "huh?" (or, in your case, "The Telegraph can has editurz?" which cracked me up....)

Anonymoustache said...

Good point Dr. J, and thanks for making it; my mistake. I should have read it again, carefully.
My (sarcastic) intent was to point out that the whole thing could have been structured/phrased much better, but I feel kinda sheepish now.

I can has mental-lasik? I can firez my proofreader neuronz?

Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde said...

It's nice to know I'm not the only one who cares....

Anonymous said...

It's a list. People, even in blogs, make lists.

There were some GREAT books in that list. Many I had read. Many I never even heard of. I'm not a scholar.

How Tortilla Flat or Cannery Row never made it.

Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court.
Confederate General In Big Sur.

I mean, the list, no matter HOW you structure, is never done. That's the purpose of lists, ain't it?

*G*