Cult Books

I just found this list at Puss Reboots, who got it from Bibliobibuli, who in turn found it at the site of The Telegraph.

The allegedly 50 best cult books. What exactly a cult book is defies an easy definition. I thought the Telegraph’s attempts at explaining it were quite funny:

Some things crop up often: drugs, travel, philosophy, an implied two fingers to conventional wisdom, titanic self-absorption, a tendency to date fast and a paperback jacket everyone recognises with a faint wince. But these don’t begin to cover it.
Cult books include some of the most cringemaking collections of bilge ever collected between hard covers. But they also include many of the key texts of modern feminism; some of the best journalism and memoirs; some of the most entrancing and original novels in the canon.

Well, whatever the definition, what we have here is a list. And I just love lists.
Sharon Bakar at Bibliobibuli had the idea to see which ones she’s read and because I’m curious I will do the same.

The books I have read are bold, the ones I am interested in reading are 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) - easily the most awful book I have read in years!
* 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) - and god was that boring
* 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) - this one was so boring that I couldn’t even finish it
* I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948) - loved it!
* 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) - no, I was wrong, THIS ONE is the most awful book I ever read (along with The Little Prince *blech*)
* 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 translated 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) - another one that bored me to tears, I think I tossed it aside after a hundred pages or so and even that was too late

That makes 13 out of 50. Not too bad, but sadly I only really enjoyed 2 of the ones I read. That doesn’t bode too well for the other ones I still plan to read one day.

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At least I hope so. Since renaming the first 9 pictures didn’t help I fiddled around some more, but embarrassingly it took me quite a while to get the idea to check the actual loadability of the single files. And what do you know, that turned out to be the whole problem. I just had to re-upload some of the pictures, because they apparently got damaged somehow during the FTP transfer and couldn’t be accessed anymore. Now everything should work as it is supposed to.
And no, even though I am a bit slow sometimes, I didn’t really take the whole day to figure this out. I actually spent most of the day outdoors, because it was one of those rare perfect spring days.

The ones among you who still actually visit my site and not read the blog in an RSS reader will have noticed it already: I have changed my theme again.

The theme is called Amazing Grace and it was made available by a guy named Vladimir Prelovac. And since I got really bored with Misty Look in the last couple of months, I am very glad I stumbled upon this new one. I have spent the last week customizing it on my testblog and I hope everything I fiddled around with is still working.

As you might have noticed there are rotating images in the header (48 different ones, to be precise). That is, most of the time they are there. Sometimes the graphics do not load on the first try and I have no idea why that happens or how I can stop it from happening. But I will keep trying to figure it out.

Anyway, apart from that little hitch I am very happy with this theme. I will go on tweaking some little things here and there (for instance the way smilies are displayed and the little category icons on the frontpage), but they will hardly be visible.

So what do you think? Do you like it?

Oh, and I also upgraded to WordPress 2.5., which went smoothly again - thank heavens. But the new dashboard still takes some gettin’ used to. But the good thing is, I’ve got a lot of nifty new plugins that make everything a little more sparkly. At least behind the scenes. LOL

Not only am I addicted to those godawful grammatically challenged LOLcats, I also couldn’t stop laughing when I stumbled over this video on Youtube. It’s called “An Engineer’s Guide to Cats”.

I can’t believe what I just found in one of my books:

It’s an adorably little bookmark - still in its original packing and with the price tag.
I bought the book last summer in a secondhand bookstore in London for 1 or 2 Pounds and had it sitting on my shelf for almost a year now without ever noticing this little thing hidden between its pages. Until I just took the book down to register it on Bookcrossing, and the bookmark slid out.
Since the price tag is in Dollar, I guess the bookmark - probably together with the book - was purchased in the US and left behind in London after a holiday (it’s quite a heavy book, so I wouldn’t wanna lug it across the pond with me twice). Or maybe it was a gift that was not appreciated and unceremoniously dumped in the next secondhand store? Hm, I wish I knew.
Anyway, now I feel compelled to read this book next.
Which book is it, you ask?
“Ahab’s Wife: Or, The Star-gazer” by Sena Jeter Naslund
Judging by the fact that it has over 230 customer reviews on Amazon.com it seems to have been quite the bestseller in its day.

This is one of those books I desperately wanted to like, just for the fact that the story is narrated by Death. Ever since meeting Terry Pratchett’s version of Death in the Discworld books, not to mention Neil Gaiman’s version in the Sandman comics, I have an ongoing crush on Death as a person.

Also, this book is about somebody who steals books. And honestly, if you have to steal at all, books are about the only thing worth doing it.

Plus, who could resist this beautiful cover art? I know I should stop judging a book by its cover, but I do it all the time anyway.

So this one should have been an easy sell on me. If, that is, there hadn’t been such a hype around it when it came out. Overhyped books generally, more often than not, turn out to be nothing special and hardly worth the time for me. *coughHarryPottercough*

And finding out that the story was set in World War II Germany didn’t help either. If there is one thing that really bores me to death it is stories about WWII, about persecuted Jews and the bad german Nazis, blah, blah, blah… I have read Anne Frank’s Diary, thank you very much. They tortured us with stories about that war all the bloody time in school, so I really am not interested anymore.

So I ended up getting a copy of the book, but whenever I looked for something to read on my shelves, my hand passed right over it and chose something else instead. But recently I finally decided I had avoided the book long enough and ought to give it a chance. And I’m glad I did, because the story really is beautiful.

Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Her brother died. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall. Death is busy during those years, but he manages nevertheless to keep an eye on the little book thief.

That sounds bleak, and it kinda is. But it is also a wonderfully hopeful story about love and friendship in unlikely places, about caring and trusting and dreaming in hard times. The fact that the story is narrated by Death himself makes the celebration of life ever so much more touching and memorable.

And then, there is Zusak’s beautiful prose. The guy really has a way with words. His language flows along and draws you into the story right from page one. Although it is a longish story I was sad to reach the end so very soon, because I just couldn’t put it down.

I ended up enjoying this book much more than I expected to. And that is always a nice gift, because it happens so rarely.

Has anybody else trouble reaching my website, too, or is that just me?

Just when I have time to fiddle around a bit, everything is slowing down to an almost standstill here. Well, whatever.
I’m gonna try a few new things here in the next couple hours, so things might get even wonkier for a while, but hopefully everything should be back to normal by tonight.