Top Fifty Cult Books (Who sits in a room somewhere and draws up these lists?)
This article in The Telegraph is well worth a read:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/10432344/50-best-cult-books.html
Too much to copy and paste. For me some I'd read some I'd never heard of. Interesting, for me, the books I'd read I didn't consider cult.
For example, The Stranger by Camus is just a great piece of literature. And surely by their definition Satre's Roads To Freedom is cult.
A further thought. Is a cult book one that you have on your bookshelf, so it looks impressive, but have never read. My copy of Jack Kerouac's On The Road sits there. But I've never read it.
Hmm I fear you have been skipreading, Huxley and Jong are both present and correct (sah!)
It is terribly dated Chris. However, the Easter holiday before I left school having read it, hitched lifts to Brighton where I spent two weeks among the 'beatniks' in the little arty cafés and beach, slept rough among them and became 'infected' with ideas such as peace, CND and so on. Many of those values have never left me. It is very, very dated but don't not read it because of that. Look at around 1950 and how people thought then, in part of the USA of course, and see how much it influenced and gave birth to modern culture. As for cult status, never because it is only interesting to an older age group really and those who study 20 century literature otherwise. I doubt younger people today would make much sense of its message.
Very amusing, Glyn. Funnily enough, I too have "On the road" sitting, unread, on my bookshelf. But... I've no idea how it got there!
Chariots of the Gods! Really??? I've read about half of them including Jong's Fear of Flying and Dr.Spock. I'm a Murakami fan but his books 1Q84 were far from the best even if they received a lot of publicity. Keep those lists coming.
I've read 8 of them, although I use the term loosely. I started reading Gravity's Rainbow but found it so totally unfathomable and boring that I gave up by about page 10. We had to read To Kill a Mockingbird in school, and my son had to read l'Etranger in school. Nice to know education establishments on both sides of the Channel are keen to maintain cult books on the study lists...
I always thought James Joyce's Ulysses (which I waded through) was considered a cult book but apparently not by the Telegraph group.
I have roughly 40 of the 50 (including Spock! - but for professional reasons). I reread On The Road periodically, it is a 'classic' as modern(-ish) books go, but cult status? No James Joyce, James Baldwin, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and where the heck is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying? I could go on and on. Some of the list in the DT are nothing like worthy of cult status except in the mind of the person who sat there navel gazing and making up that list.