Apr 26 2008
Ooooh, cult book reading list!
The Telegraph has a list of the 50 best-ever cult books (for good and bad reasons, so you don't need to feel like you have to rush out and read them all). Top of the list is Slaughterhouse 5: such a fantastic book. I spent the whole summer of my 16th year reading Kurt Vonnegut books, one after the other, as my dad had loads of Vonnegut paperbacks around the house and then there were more up at a house we rented at Fallen Leaf Lake that summer, near Lake Tahoe; but somehow I didn't get to Slaughterhouse 5 til college. I still remember my whole open-eyed college-girl naivety reading about Dresden, which didn't fit in with the Hollywood version of WWII I'd have been more familiar with.
So many of the books on that list make me smile or laugh out loud; either remembering them with affection -- or embarrassment, I'm afraid. I'm delighted to see some of my own most loved and lesser known books, including The Master and Margarita (one of those books you read then buy for everyone else on birthdays and holidays). As the reviewer says: "Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper."
What really fascinates me are the zeitgeist novels that are really cringemaking when you look at them now but seemed so... meaningful at the time. Amongst those I'd include books like Fear of Flying, on the Telegraph list, and probably one that comes to mind from the same era but not on the list, Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I read it at just the right age, I think, and it seemed to be the perfect novel, and Robbins to be just so ultra-cool and feminist and the kind of guy you wanted to run way with on the back of a motorcycle. I haven't thought about that book or all the other Robbins books I devoured afterwards, in a long long time -- somehow I don't think they'd be quite so treasured now, but I'd have to go back and reread it to be sure. Anyway check out the Telegraph list and see if your special treasures (or anti-treasures) are there. Jonathan Livingston Seagull... how vomitorious!
2 responses so far
To my surprise, I find that even I have read some of these “cult” books: Confessions; Hitchhiker’s; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Master and Margarita; No Logo; On The Road. And one is on my bookshelves at the moment (The Road to Oxiana), which is practically the same as having read it, right?
An article in the previous issue of New Scientist on “Life-Changing” books is in the same vein.
Ah, Slaughterhouse Five…. a huge favourite of mine, despite being responsible for the fact that far too many of my verbal reactions to events in the 1990′s consisted of just three words. So it goes….