Time for another book thread! I’ve got a little bit of an ulterior motive for this one. I’m looking for examples of your favorite or least favorite cult books — either fiction or non-fiction.
I’m not necessarily looking for books that have a small but devoted following (though those are fine) but also for those books that seemed to be everywhere at some point in time — the kind of books that friends pressed upon you, insisting you read them, telling you they had “changed their life.”
In one discussion of cult books over on Metafilter, a commenter described his list of suggestions as “what any self-respecting 80s stoner would have had on his bookshelf.” Replace 80s with any decade you’d prefer, and “stoner” with “nerd” or “punk” or whatever suits you better, and you get the idea.
Some examples of the sort of books I’m looking for:
- Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse
- The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig
- The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
Feel free to post examples that are far more obscure and/or recent. Or examples of books that “everybody read” at one point that have become obscure, or that people mainly remember as an embarrassment.
These can be books that you personally love, or books that you can’t understand why anyone loves.
“The Westing Game” — Ellen Raskin
“Murder Ink” — Dilys Winn
“Danse Macabre” — Stephen King
I’m of that generation that thought “Jonathan Livingstone Seagull” was practically all you needed to read to attain enlightenment.
ETA: I’m quite proud that I’ve managed to resist numerous attempts to get me to read “Neuromancer”; that’s pretty popular with a certain section of my mates.
Was forced to read The Dice Man and The Magus
Ooh, I suppose no discussion on this subject can be complete with a mention of “Stranger in a Strange Land”.
I must confess I really “grok” the unabridged version.
My dad who went to college in the 70’s has both seagull and strange land, so I can confirm.
For the sf/f folks of his generation, I’ll add the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Virtually every D&D player from back then seems to have read it, which is quite remarkable when you consider that no one seems to have actually liked it. I guess they only had like 5 fantasy books total back then and if you liked fantasy you had to read all of them.
We’re talking about a trilogy of middle-length novels about a bitter, self-pitying rapist with leprosy, in which the good guys rarely win, all written in stilted, Wagnerian prose by a man who was evidently bitten by a radioactive thesaurus.
I personally happen to love these books, so it saddens me that no one in my generation seems to have read them or even heard if them, and the oldsters who have aren’t willing to discuss them except to note that they were “frustrating” and “weird.” They also seem uninterested in the fact that the author went on to write 7 more Thomas Covenant books, as well as space opera that was actually much better than Covenant.
Edit: the first volume is even more unpleasant than the others and also feels a bit pointless as a standalone, since it doesn’t resolve any if the questions is raises. It was rejected 20 or 30 times. In fact, it was rejected by EVERY fantasy publisher that existed when he wrote it, but the author didn’t revise it. He just waited for more publishers to come into being, and submitted it to them. He used the delay to write both sequels to his seemingly unpublishable masterpiece.
Never really got the love for His Dark Materials trilogy, I thought the first book was good and the rest were shit.
I didn’t like the whole Dan Brown DaVinci Code, but I have to say it was an easy read and not as bad as people made out, but not good either.
50 Shades of Gray – ha ha! That was truly awful and there is much better written porn online.
I never read Harry potter, but there was a time when everyone on the tube was reading it. These days I guess a lot of people download books, so it’s much harder to tell what people are reading.
When I was in high school in the 90s, everyone read the Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean M. Auel and the Hot Zone, that scare book about ebola.
@Alan – Anthony Lane wrote a piece in the New Yorker awhile back in which he mentioned a friend who had, against all advice, read Jonathan Livingston Seagull: “A fortnight later, he was sitting up and taking solids again.”
Some other cult books I failed to grok:
The Secret
The Celestine Prophecy
Dune
On The Road
The Prophet (not badly written, just over-quoted and kitschy. In the same vein, “Le Petit Prince”)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
If you’re looking for something pithy and entertaining in short bursts, I’d recommend Mark Twain’s Letters. The man could scold.
I’m very fond of The Hobbit, and it seems like everyone read that at the same time.
I keep going back to Pratchett’s Discworld series, and to Erickson’s Malazan Empire series.
Eh, I can’t really say I like any “cult” books, mostly because I don’t really keep track of what books are considered “cult” or not and I don’t know the exact criteria, but if there’s one series I think doesn’t get enough love, it’s the Tantalize series, which I think I’ve mentioned numerous times. XD It’s like Twilight, but better-written, not abusive, and actually interesting.
I’ve also been reading The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Bedoor, and that’s going pretty good, and I don’t know if anyone’s really heard of those?
I also need to finish John Dies at the End, but I don’t know if that’s a “cult” one anymore because there’s a movie made of it?
[rant] I also have read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, so the movie trailers are really jittering my critters, if I might borrow a phrase from Scildfreja. I am getting so miffed about them. SO MANY MISTAKES HAVE BEEN MADE. (ʘ‿ʘ✿)
I don’t even think I was this mad about the Harry Potter movie’s disimilarities.
Like, I know there’s going to be some because there’s always some disimilarities for whatever reason, but mashing three characters together, giving this Mash Character the wrong powers and casting one of the main characters as not an old woman in the slightest seems like a bit too much. [/rant]
I’m most likely still going to see it though.
Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist”. Was absolutely everywhere here when I was a teenager, and never seems to have actually gone out of print for 5 consecutive minutes. There’s a brand new edition that’s been on display at my local Chapters for months.
Funny David should mention “Siddartha”. My mom was on one of the very first reestablished tourist flights to Cuba, as an unaccompanied young woman. Apparently that was the time and place to go there if you wanted to meet really weird people, including one guy she met who creeped the hell out of her for the duration of the trip and who wouldn’t shut up about the awesomeness of “Siddartha”. She remembers him, she remembers the book, she made sure to never read it.
User name synergy detected!
I put the Tantalize series on my list, haven’t gotten to them yet.
@ buttercup
🙂 🙂 🙂
I have a friend who literally wears flowers in her hair and hugs trees and even she thinks it’s ‘hippy dippy shite’
“All you can learn from seagulls is how to steal chips and shit on car windscreens”
@Cygnia
The Westing Game was my favorite book in gradeschool! Ah, memories…
Beautiful. Thank you Orion.
Lemme see, I’ve read only a handful of cult books – Stranger in a Strange Land, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Teachings of Don Juan and I suppose Lord of the Rings counts? Funnily enough, they all strike me now as having something in common … bloated, self-indulgent, tedious and massively over-rated.
(as a kind of comparison marker, to titrate my personal tolerance for relatively long and unrelieved texts – Tristram Shandy or The Monkey King)
Ender’s Game. One of those books you will feel differently about when you re-read it as an adult.
Heh. I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. And at least one other book by that dude.
In my defense, the books take like ten minutes to read. And I was young.
Alan, so you didn’t like The Dice Man and The Magus? They’re in a lot of “cult fiction’ lists, so I’m curious as to what you didn’t like about them.
A Series of Unfortunate Events. Never read em, everyone else did, liked the movie, glad for the Netflix show
Artemis Fowl. Overwhelmed by HP, heard the concept was good if nothing else
There was that year everyone had a book about chess. I love chess! Breaking Dawn, eh? There’s a series? I’m in!
Disaster was narrowly avoided
In ladyporn, mom and her buddies all got into the Black Dagger Brotherhood series at the same time. Don’t know if that was particularly widespread or just seemed so
All that said, I’m the dude who read Inferno for funsies (with the 8000pp of footnotes), so maybe I’m the culty guy
@Paradoxy
Fuhsyrius!? And I got mad (to this day and justifiably so) when the dragon scene in Goblet of Fire went on too long!
Then again, this is Burton. Muffuga fused Joker and Joe Chill in his Batman movies and fucked up the guy’s whole origin. It’s a prollem with him…
Well, I can kind of forgive Burton on the Joker/Joe Chill thing, because one, Joe Chill isn’t someone many casual Batman fans would know about, and two, this is comics we’re talking about. Errybody gets a new origin story every couple of months or so, and Joker constantly makes his up, so we technically don’t know what his actually is, because he’s an Unreliable Narrator. So, he at least has a bit of an excuse on that one, IMO.
I can’t forgive this one, because one, the three characters that appear to be combined are the main character’s love interest, the girl who is on the cover of the first book, and some character that actually doesn’t exist in the bookverse, but somehow has water powers.
And two, I still can’t forgive Miss Peregrine being played by a young woman, when she’s specifically described as an older woman in the books. Like, Hollywood pls get your shit together and let old women be old women. We age too, ya bastards.
Though, I will admit, I really had my heart set on Dame Maggy Smith playing her. She’s so perfect for the role, and while Eva Green is a fantastic actress (I love her in Penny Dreadful), she’s just too damn young to be playing her. : /
The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – Stephen R. Donaldson
Heroes Die – Mathew Woodring Stover
Dharma Bums – Jack Kerouac
Travels With Charley – John Steinbeck
Selected Poems – Langston Hughes
Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu (Attributed)
Orion I actually loved the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. 🙂
Does “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” count? I didn’t read every single one of the series but the first one, in my opinion, is definitely worth a read for any Sci-fi enthusiast. I keep trying to get my SO to read it, but all he ever reads is Star Wars books.
The Illuminatus Trilogy! (Robert Shea)
The Book of the SubGenius
Principia Discordia
The Devils of Loudun (Aldous Huxley)
Non-fiction, I have a couple. The Selfish Gene is a really eye-opening book on how genetics actually works. It’s from Dawkins, though, so I can understand wanting to get it from a library instead of buying it. Really, though, it’s brilliant at explaining evolution in a way that no other book I’ve read has, and pretty much any evolutionary biologist-or-adjacent person I’ve known has nodded knowingly on mention of it.
I’ve mentioned Godel, Escher, Bach before. It’s big, but it’s an entertaining read and it blends together music, math, and reality into a real treasure. If you aren’t good at math but you want to understand what makes your dorky friends all excited when talking about it, this is the book to do it. I wish everyone would read this one. Most people have either never heard of it or have loved it to pieces, so I imagine this qualifies as a cult classic.
@Paradoxy
Not Joker’s origin, Batman’s origin. Doesn’t really work if the guy who killed his parents is a supervillain. Then again, I don’t think Batman’s ever really worked outside of the Adam West series, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask
But you’re right about the Comics Are Weird angle. Regardless, it shows a trend in Burton’s work, re: fidelity to source material. The Lone Ranger exists for fuck’s sake…
Also, it seems kinda fitting that an XMen knockoff (as far as the movie adaptation is concerned, the book could be entirely unrelated) has similar character fuckery issues to its inspiration
Re: cult books
Anything written by the ‘4 Horsemen’. Letter to a Christian Nation, God Delusion, the like
ETA: Kinda sorta ninjad by Scildfreja on the New Atheist stuff
@ David F
”The Magus”
Are you familiar with ‘the Chris Carter Effect’ (as TVTropes calls it)?
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChrisCarterEffect
I think The Magus is an early example of that. Don’t get me wrong. Whilst I’m actually reading the book I enjoy it (and I have read it a few times). However there’s the issue that each ‘answer’ just becomes another mystery, and eventually it’s just such a pile up of unresolved questions that it left me with a feeling of being unsatisfied by the ending.
I’m quite happy with ambiguity, and often times a narrative that doesn’t explain everything at the end can be very enjoyable; especially when it lets you ponder all the various interpretations and explanations. So I wasn’t insisting on a Scooby Doo style exposition.
However the thing with The Magus is that there aren’t enough clues to even allow that. It’s just one weird thing pulled out of a hat after another. In a way it almost feels ‘abandoned’ rather than finished.
I hope that makes some sense. I can expand if you’d like but that’s my overall gist. Like I say there are some really enjoyable individual scenes and sub plots. But I find the overall work unsatisfying (as opposed to unsatisfactory if you get the distinction)
“The Dice Man”
It’s that classic thing of a high concept but then perhaps explored just a little too far. I think it would have made a great novella or even short story but it just seems a bit long, like a TV episode that’s been padded out to movie length. There were some interesting potential consequences of Luke’s lifestyle to consider. Personally though I’d have preferred to consider those myself. I didn’t want it all spelling out. I was happy to be lead to the water as it were but I felt a bit resentful that I was then forced to drink the author’s prefer brand of mineral water.
In summary perhaps what I’m trying to say is I would have preferred “Here’s an interesting idea, imagine the possibilities” rather than “Here’s the idea and this is how it all pans out”
Hope that makes some sense?