Marramgrass

A reading list.

The Telegraph’s 50 best cult books, following the example of Random Piercings. Please do join in.

The rules: books you’ve read in bold and books you started but never quite finished in italics.

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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 (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)
  • 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)
  • The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
  • 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)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig(1974)

I could have added a third category, of the books I plan to read when I come across them.