Cult Classics Project


Defining a "cult classic" is practically impossible, but we all know it when we encounter it. They range from the horrid and cringeworthy to the brilliant and beautiful. They cross genres and eras and styles. But they all have one thing in common (in my humble opinion) :: They deliver a serious mindf*ck. These are stories designed to rearrange your thinking. With a tendency to challenge the status quo, cult classics veer off the beaten path and offer readers something new. They also change the reader in some way, and many a reader of a cult classic finds him/herself keeping a dog-eared copy on hand, well-read and practically memorized.

I hope to read these alternabooks over the next few years:
  1. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
  2. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  3. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  4. Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard
  5. Dune by Frank Herbert
  6. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
  7. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  8. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
  9. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
  10. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  11. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
  12. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
  13. The Stranger by Albert Camus
  14. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
  15. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  16. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
  17. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
  18. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  19. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  20. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  21. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
  22. Necromancer by William Gibson
  23. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  24. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
  25. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
  26. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  27. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
  28. The Magus by John Fowles
  29. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susan
  30. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  31. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
  32. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  33. The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf
  34. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailor
  35. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
  36. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  37. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller
  38. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  39. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  40. The Third Policeman by Brian O'Nolan (Zibilee)
  41. Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews (Care)
  42. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Trish)
  43. Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (Rajdeep)
  44. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (Kristen)
  45. The Tao of Poo by Benjamin Hoff (Kristen)
  46. Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach (Kristen)
  47. Lord of the Flies by William Golding (bookdout)
  48. 1984 by George Orwell (Jenny Girl)

If you have any CULT books, of the classic variety, that you think I should add to the list, please let me know!
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