Cult books (?) meme

This is from the UK's Telegraph, originally, gacked from one of my LJ friends. As the journalist points out, it's hard to define what makes a cult book, vs. a best seller, and the two are not necessarily the same. I'm a little shocked not just at how many of these I've read, but how early I was drawn to this kind of book. Some of them I read when I was a kid, or a very young adult. Here's what the Telegraph calls a cult book:

In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

I like the "mental flophouse" line. I wish my boarders would start paying rent. There are a lot of them.

I've added a few of my own to this list, since it's sort of heavily British and weighted with boys' coming of age stories.I'm not even going to touch the fact that they've treated a number of ovarian (I refuse to use the word "seminal" in this context) feminist texts as "cult" literature, or the way their description trivializes The Female Eunuch. Because, you know, we're such a minority. Like those whack-job Arthurians and the SF nuts.

My additions are in blue. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read, strikeout the ones you hated.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) One of my friends did her Ph.D. dissertation on Durrell and I read bits of that. Does that count?
A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) I've read bits and pieces of this, just to see where my parents were getting their tactics from. No such luck.
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) See Dianetics, below. And have a tin foil hat, while you're at it.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) This one I keep looking at in the bookstore thinkking, hmm, that looks good.
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) That's not a cult book. It's a cult. Period.
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) Tried this one, too, but thought it was stupid.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979) On the long list to be read.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) Well, I tried, anyway. V was better.
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) Why is repetition considered so clever? The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities were far better than this.
Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) Cut me a break; I was like, twelve, at the time.
The Magus by John Fowles (1966) Tedious and disappointing.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-55) Hello? How did they miss this one?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
The Merlin Series by Mary Stewart (1970-1995) Responsible for the creation of many Arthurians and medievalists.
No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) I liked Dharma Bums better, though.
The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923) I got a copy of this for my HS graduation from my favorite cool cousin.
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) Also on my reading list, along with Steppenwolf.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961) How can you ignore a book whose principal neologism, grok, has become part of the language?
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968) Thought this wa sa dumb book, too.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Comments

[Beth]

That's an interesting list of books! I've read nearly exactly the same books you've read. _Godel, Escher Bach_ was a life-changing experience, and still have my copy. Your Calvino remarks are right on. Joelle Dietrick had a really cool piece up at the faculty show at FSU recently, and I thought of Invisible Cities even before I read the label and realized she must be working through a series of her own imaginary cities. The pieces mesh nicely with my whole Calvino aesthetic. See a slide show of her stuff here: http://www.fsu.edu/~art/pages/people/faculty/dietrick.shtml.
I'd mark through _The Celestine Prophecies_: you can read it standing up in the bookstore (I did, as much of it as I could stand), but to me the awful writing obscures any wisdom that might be lurking within. Years and years ago I started _A Confederacy of Dunces_ but didn't get to finish it because it wasn't mine and I was visiting. I remember thinking it was really wonderful way back then. Last month I bought a copy, and this time around I'm just mightily irritated by the main character and his supporting cast of enablers. _Zen and the Art ..._ was a favorite.

[quirkyartist]

I ditched The Fountainhead also.