You best damn well better believe I’ve got a cornucopia of mutant fucking squash on my table.  I’d throw up some corn stalks and scarecrows if I lived in a house, but something tells me my condo association would throw me on the curb if I turned my hallway into an apple orchard. 

But honestly?  Colin Nissan’s piece is the funniest thing I’ve read in two weeks.

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

A new edition of the book is being paired up with the other seminal West tome, Miss Lonelyhearts (New Directions, $11.95 with a foreword from Jonathan Lethem) and if you’ve never read either, then do so. 

Both are highly required reading and still relevent to today’s world.

The Day of Locusts is a pretty perfect slice of the perverse Hollywood underbellyand still burns like a sharp roman candle 70 years after its first publication. 

The LA Times has high praise for the book and its author. 

Los Angeles has been the subject of, and setting for, many fine novels, yet “The Day of the Locust” still feels like the single best-achieved, and most oracular, piece of fiction the city has inspired. West wanted to show the dump behind the dream, and he did it in spades; but he proved too that L.A. could be the seedbed of high art. Tod Hackett’s epic dream painting becomes a metaphor for what West actually did achieve.

“He was going to show the city burning at high noon, so that the flames would have to compete with the desert sun and therefore appear less fearful, more like bright flags flying from roofs and windows than a terrible holocaust. He wanted the city to have a gala air as it burned, to appear almost gay. And the people who set it on fire would be a holiday crowd.”
 

As someone who is largely unfamiliar with the author and his body of work, it was this hyperbolic description of Imperial that grabbed my attention knickers and forced me to hike them up. 

“Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to read a book like that?  Yes please.

The Second Pass examines 10 books that should be fired from the literature canon. The mistake they make, however, is twofold. The first is the inclusion of books that arguably haven’t even been canonized yet.

No one would argue that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections don’t deserve the acclaim they’ve received, but it’s difficult to accept that they are safely in “the canon” to begin with. Their newness is a detriment. Maybe one day they’ll get there, but the canon exists as a statement for literature that has stood the test of time.

We could argue about whether or not the gatekeeping of the mythical canon is even relevant (and risk being attacked by Harold Bloom in the process) today; yet, it seems as if the canon, a lightpost illuminating significant works of literature, is a mercurial thing — changing with time, circumstance, reevaluation. 

It’s very function is to create a communal vocabulary, a sense of shared culture.  It’s hardly ever up-to-date with the times.  Still, the literature that reflects our culture now, probably won’t be ascertained until we’re long gone.

And in that sense, The Second Pass should be commended for dipping their toes into this muddy pool.  Especially given that culture changes every three months and is so fragmented that having one guidepost seems, well, outdated.

But, the second problem with their list is that many of the novels aren’t exactly sacred cows. With the exception of On the Road, White Noise, and One Hundred Years of Solitude the other five books seem like safe selections. Feathers won’t be ruffled by their inclusion here. 

Oh really, A Tale of Two Cities, The Rainbow, Absalom Absalom, Jacob’s Room, and The U.S.A. Trilogy should be taken down a peg or two.  Okay, fine, whatever.  They were never on the peg to begin with in my lifetime. 

Two novels I would’ve like to have seem them take down would be James Joyce’s Ulysses and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. It would have been nice for them to really go for it because it seems as if the canon should be altered.  I don’t think I’d rely on Harold Bloom to help me pick out a decent sci-fi novel, comic book or anything genre related.

Post-modern Essentials

The list of 61 essential postmodern reads gives points for: • author is a character • self-contradicting plot • disrupts/plays with form • comments on its own bookishness • plays with language • includes fictional artifacts such as letters • blurs reality and fiction • includes historical falsehoods • overtly references other fictional works • more than 1000/less than 200 pages • postmodern progenitor.

I’m not usually a fan of post-modern literature; I often find the stories too clever, too enamored with their tricks and conventions and flourishes, instead of just telling a damn good story.  Too often, it feels like reading the work of an academic instead of a raconteur.

Essential Beach Reading

NPR is in the process of winnowing their list of 200 great beach reads to compile their diffinitive list of the 100 best beach books.  Sometimes you just need something you can polish off in a day or two without really reflecting on it all that much.  Coincidentally, many of these books have been “canonized.”  So there you go.

Plenty of sites attempt this with their best-of currations.  And while I get the need for those types of list, many of those books always seem dated, past their relevance; the usual “greatest books of all-time” lists (whatever that means anyways) always includes the likes of The Great Gatsby, Ulysses, Lolita, et. al. but they always seems daunting and impersonal.  A little too samey.

 ”The fact is, no one needs another best-of list telling you how great The Great Gatsby is,” Newsweek says in their just published Fifty Books for Our Times. “What we do need, in a world with precious little time to read (and think), is to know which books — new or old, fiction or nonfiction — open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.”

Among the selected books are Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, William Faulkner’s The Bear, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,  Don DeLillo’s Underworld. 

The list is an intriguing mix of fiction and non-fiction and don’t hew to any particular time frame.  The common themes running throughout seem to be that of terrorism and war in the Middle East, financial uncertainty, environmentalism and food, social change, and science vs. religion. 

It’s an extremely thoughtful and well-thought out list.  Many of these books, I haven’t read but I feel as though I must to have a clearer understanding of the world around me.

You might remember the 206 Nick Cassavetes’s movie Alpha Dog, with the very easy to look at Justin Timberlake, Ben Foster, Anton Yelchin and Emile Hirsch, playing pretend thuggery.  At the time the movie was publicized as the gritty-star-making performances for all the young stars involved!  And maybe they were.  The movie was quite good in that glossy Hollywood kind of way.  But you couldn’t help but feel sorry about the whole sordid affair.  And how the movie turned empty, hollow mid-level suburban drug pushers into something sexy. 

Anyway, with the amount of content that hits The Awl everyday, it would be easy to look past this, for now, two-part series.  But the prose is crisp and vivid. 

Besides the personal, concrete details that sketch a portrait of the murdered 15-year-old, Nick Markowitz, this is from the just-published second installment and it put a lump in my throat:

The TEC-DC9 featured in the photographs submitted to the jury was the weapon used to kill Nick. The gun was in the shallow grave with Nick’s body. It belonged to Hollywood but was fired by Hoyt. A TEC-DC9 is monstrous and formidable. It has a closed bolt design, meaning one pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the weapon ejects the bullet cartridge and loads another. This particular weapon had been modified into a fully-automatic hand gun. The bolt had been “grinded down” so that it could fire multiple bullets at one time. This gun was capable of firing off 800 to 1,000 bullets a minute.

During the 1980s, the gun became extremely popular for non-hunting reasons because it was so easily to modify into a fully-automatic. The gun was banned in 1994 in the U.S., but similar variants were produced until 2001.

Are you getting a picture of the kind of person that Jesse James Hollywood is?  The real one is not as glamorous as Emile Hirsch, nor as pretty.  He is thuggish, muscular, brutish.  The kind of person that would kill a boy over a $1,200 debt. 

More than anything else, the description of the gun and its cruel mechanics gave the most direct sense of horror in the trial. The obvious and intentional brutality of the weapon undermines so much testimony. The gun, the fact that you can hold the damn thing in your hand, is more substantial and therefore more affecting than the subjective, agonized testimony of Nick’s father and brother. If you want any indication of what sort of person Jesse James Hollywood is, he’s the type of person who owns a TEC-9.

This is a disservice to nuance, however. Life is much more complex than that, evidenced by Claude Brown’s wondrous account of his life during the Civil Rights movement in Manchild in the Promised Land.

Published in 1965, Manchild in the Promised Land is an inner city coming-of-age tale first and foremost. Claude Brown’s fictionalized retelling of his own life is a complex story of survival and hope; one that history often buries for convenience sake. Raised on the streets of poverty-stricken Harlem, Brown’s childhood was one of crime, drugs, hustlers and violence all recounted in angry slice of life details.

Brown’s protagonist Sonny spends time in and out of various reform schools from the age of nine. When not at school he spends his days selling drugs and hanging out with his Italian friend Minetti. He grows up, gets his GED and moves down south to live with his grandparents for a brief time escaping from his city prison. But the book doesn’t reach majestic heights until he returns to Harlem as a young man. It is there that we see why Sonny had to escape his home, why he had to get out of Harlem.  

His younger brother was living the same criminal life he used to; close friends and loved ones had overdosed from heroin. All around him chaos is swirling as the Civil Rights Movement barrels forward. Though he experienced both the peaceful non-violent resistance favored down south and the black power movement favored in the northern inner cities, it becomes evident that Sonny was too busy surviving his own life to be concerned with Civil Rights.

Sonny, and by extension Claude Brown as well, grew up to understand that there was no solution to black equality. While he may have been angry at his environment, he was intelligent enough to know that blacks cannot function in America without help from their white counterparts. He saw people for what they were and understood what he needed to do to get away from Harlem and save himself without having to rely on others such as the SCLC, the Islamic faith, or the black power movement.

Coming-of-age tales generally make the most compelling memoirs, there is nothing like rooting for a person to become the best version of themselves, to learn and grow and be born out of their harrowing environment. But what makes this one particularly interesting and an essential one is that it takes what you think you know about a specific era in American history and offers an alternative. Sonny considers the pull of the black power movement and understands the wisdom behind Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This story of human survival and empowerment suggests, like The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (the quintessential work of African-American empowerment), that education is the great equalizer.

Manchild in the Promised Land is a transcendent work of unequaled importance. It is one of the few books about the Civil Rights movement to capture the sadness and trauma of everyday life in city ghettos. People will be reading this thoroughly entertaining story for years to come – if for nothing else than bucking conventional wisdom and offering an inspiring character to root for. We want Sonny to succeed and escape his horrible life and when he does, well, elation is the word that springs to mind.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.

His latest book, Nocturnes, is a collection of five short stories and will be released on September 22, 2009.  It is, apparantly, quite good. 

Not that there should be any doubt about that.  Never Let Me Go is a transcendent book for the ages, it was afterall featured on Time’s list of the 100 greatest books since 1925. 

Nocturnes is Ishiguro’s first collection of short stories, after six novels. He has said in interviews that he conceived the book holistically, almost as a piece of music in five movements. Like a cycle, the collection begins and ends in the same place – Italy – and it contains modulations of tone that would be awkward within a single narrative. The opening story, “Crooner”, establishes a mood of quiet melancholy. Tony Gardner, an ageing American singer, comes to Venice with his wife, Lindy. He hires Jan, a guitarist from a band in the Piazza San Marco, to accompany him while he serenades his wife from a gondola beneath their hotel window. [...]

All the narrators in Nocturnes sound roughly similar and the collection is saved from monotony by Ishiguro’s subtle shifts of register. The second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, is largely farcical, involving a man impersonating a dog in an effort to cover up a mistake. The third story is more refl ective before the fourth , “Nocturne”, reintroduces an element of absurdity. A talented saxophonist whose wife has left him is persuaded to have facial surgery to make him more marketable. He meets Lindy Gardner from the opening story (recently divorced from Tony) in the exclusive wing of the hotel where they have both been sent to recuperate. The story contains the collection’s funniest moment, as the saxophonist finds himself embarrassed on a stage with one arm up a turkey.

It has a decidely Gawker feel to it, back when that site wasn’t an illiterate parody of itself.  There’s already contributions from Emily Gould and several of the commenters are recognizable. 

After Alex, Choire and Emily left Nick Denton’s universe, I can honestly say I pretty much stopped visiting the neighborhood.  It’ll be nice to have them all back in one place.

NEW YORK (AP) — A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year.

The Pale King, excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out Monday, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.

Wallace’s longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Company, will release the novel. Little, Brown said in a statement Sunday that the novel runs “several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material.”

Wallace, best known for the 1,000-page novel Infinite Jest, was a longtime sufferer from depression who committed suicide last fall. He was 46 and had been working on The Pale King for several years. 

Read The New Yorker’s excerpt. 

His review of Stephen Daldry’s The Reader was something of a wonder – combining theology, friendship, ethics, dinner parties with Gene Siskel, conservatism and Rush Limbaugh, the worst sin of his life, science, and the human condition – all to say that The Reader is not really about the Holocaust, it is about so much more. 

His latest essay, because it’s not really a movie review of any kind, tackles Shakespeare, SETI, death, legacies, Warner Herzog, Studs Terkel, writing, existentialism, Prospero, fractals and Google, oh my!

So why then did he write? Why am I writing? Why do you write? Why are you reading? Why do we read Shakespeare? Not for a moment would I compare us to him; it simply occurs to me that we are all in the same boat.

“A person has to participate,” Studs Terkel liked to say. That’s how I feel. Meditating on futility–that’s no way to live. One of the most useful pieces of advice ever given me, at a time when I despaired, was: Act as if. Act as if you make a difference. If infinity is too big for you, live in the day. Shakespeare as usual expressed this better than anyone else, and it took him six words: To be, or not to be. That wasn’t simply an expression of the Existentialist choice between choosing to live or die. It was the choice to act, or not to act. To participate.

“Martin Luther said if he knew the world ended tomorrow, he would plant a tree,” Werner Herzog told me. “I would start a film.” What would I do? Plan to review it, and ask my editor to save some space in the paper. If you admire Herzog, you might want to pre-order your tickets. In the cartoons, there are always those wild-eyed guys with a placard saying, The End is Now. We are saved by a loophole: It is never Now yet.

My writer’s crush on Roger Ebert came on unexpectedly and without remorse.  He always seemed like a great film reviewer once upon a time not too long ago when paired with Gene Siskel and later Richard Roeper.  But nothing special.  

However, over the past year he has developed into something worth remembering.  He has become a special writer, a fine thinker, essential reading.  I wonder if all this means he knows he’s approaching the final landing soon.

“His body of work is so large and thoroughly lauded, his achievements by now so familiar — the casual erudition, the inhuman rate of production, the pioneering application of top-flight, literary-descriptive prose to vaginas, breasts, penises, and bodily excretions — that it’s hard to see any of it fresh,” writes Sam Anderson of Vulture.  “It can be intimidating. Dipping into his work sometimes feels like going for a day hike on Mt. Everest. What’s the point?”

The point, as Anderson notes, is that your life will be enriched.  Tom Mallon has a lovely grace-note here. You can read online archives of Updike’s work at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Review Of Books, and The New Republic.

“All these books are also packed with art, and many contain long sections of photo and design illustrations that were intended to be essays in themselves. So each of these books is not only about looking at the world, but is also full of images for you to look at,” writes Annalee Newitz at io9.  “These books are a terrific way to learn more about what’s going on beneath the surface of things – and to celebrate the ambivalent power of design and media.”

To be honest, I’ve managed to escape my entire life without having read any of these books.  I know, I know, right?  It’s almost crazy in a way.  But now that Penguin is reissuing these books, complete with the typo title of Marshall McLuhan’s book restored, now is as good as time as any to delve into these titles.

Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart explains the thinking behind the re-releases: “Part of Penguin’s creative publishing direction includes refreshing some classic creative texts that still sell many thousands of copies each year, despite their tired covers and designs that haven’t been touched for decades.

“I approached Yes Design to work on unifying these four books into a timeless and dignified series, while also taking much care to complement the integrity of the original texts.”

YES studio from the UK did the design work and it is scrumptious.  More can be found on these reissues at CR Blog and Design Sojourn.

“What is snark? You recognize it when you see it — a tone of teasing, snide, undermining abuse, nasty and knowing, that is spreading like pinkeye through the media and threatening to take over how Americans converse with each other and what they can count on as true. Snark attempts to steal someone’s mojo, erase her cool, annihilate her effectiveness. In this sharp and witty polemic, New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby takes on the snarkers, naming the nine principles of snark — the standard techniques its practitioners use to poison their arrows. Snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter.

“In this highly entertaining essay, Denby traces the history of snark through the ages, starting with its invention as personal insult in the drinking clubs of ancient Athens, tracking its development all the way to the age of the Internet, where it has become the sole purpose and style of many media, political, and celebrity Web sites. Snark releases the anguish of the dispossessed, envious, and frightened; it flows when a dying class of the powerful struggles to keep the barbarians outside the gates, or, alternately, when those outsiders want to take over the halls of the powerful and expel the office-holders. Snark was behind the London-based magazine Private Eye, launched amid the dying embers of the British empire in 1961; it was also central to the career-hungry, New York-based magazine Spy. It has flourished over the years in the works of everyone from the startling Roman poet Juvenal to Alexander Pope to Tom Wolfe to a million commenters snarling at other people behind handles. Thanks to the grand dame of snark, it has a prominent place twice a week on the opinion page of the New York Times.

“Denby has fun snarking the snarkers, expelling the bums and promoting the true wits, but he is also making a serious point: the Internet has put snark on steroids. In politics, snark means the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side can win. For the young, a savage piece of gossip could ruin a reputation and possibly a future career. And for all of us, snark just sucks the humor out of life. Denby defends the right of any of us to be cruel, but shows us how the real pros pull it off. Snark, he says, is for the amateurs.”

I have nothing against snark, I use it all the time.  It’s an effective way for some of us to gain the upperhand against borish loudmouth obnoxious people.  “Erase her cool,” as the blurb puts it.  I’m not cool, but I do enjoy taking those that think they are down a peg or three.

But rather than use snark, I use smarm.  Smarm is like snark, but it’s much more loving.  It’s snark in the form of a smile and a hug.  Seriously.  Have you ever trafficked in smarm?  People love to get made fun of as long as it’s witty and done with a bit of elan.

This will always be an important factor for education systems, until, of course, there is enough money to pay teachers a highly compensated professional salary on par with their required training and certifications to perform their job.  It’s not just recognizing who are the great effective teachers, part of it is getting people to want to be teachers.  To make the profession a desirable one.

Until you begin to pay them like the best and the brightest you won’t necessarily attract the best and brightest to teach in public schools.  That’s of course not to say teachers aren’t the best and brightest.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with some great teachers and as a student there are a handful that have shaped my intellectual curiosity – my mom being one of them.  Like many fields, great teachers have “it.”  They’re engaging and guiding.  Patient and rock solid.  Unflappable.  Loving, caring, and full of heart.  They are a strange combination of loving parent, guiding muse, and confidence booster.

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality. After years of worrying about issues like school funding levels, class size, and curriculum design, many reformers have come to the conclusion that nothing matters more than finding people with the potential to be great teachers. But there’s a hitch: no one knows what a person with the potential to be a great teacher looks like.

So there you go.  Interesting read.

It didn’t.

Imagine if heartbreak and tragedy were bestowed upon the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins football team.  Imagine if fate had a different plan for you – as if you were to pay penance for an eternity because of a single glorious night.

Now imagine you are the basketball players for the North Jackson Cheifs, from the tiny rural town of Stevensen, AL.

Stevenson lies between two ridges in north Alabama, by the Tennessee River, a dark blue vein on the earth. There, on Valentine’s Day 1992, the North Jackson Chiefs hosted the Fort Payne Wildcats in high school basketball. It was not a playoff game, not even a conference game, and neither team was especially good. But in the 117-year history of organized basketball, it was one of the few times a team with only two remaining players beat a team that still had five.

If this were a movie, the story would end at the final buzzer. The winners would always be winners, fists in the air and black jerseys glistening, and the losers would always hang their heads. This is not a movie. Morning came and they all woke up.

This is the bifurcated story of exhileration and heartbreak; the story of a team who beat the odds, who won a basketball game in overtime when all but two of their players fouled out; the story of a poor community that had nothing except each other and then this basketball win that is still talked about in the bars and restaurants.  The real story, though, is the heartbreak that would occur in the ensuing decade with players being shot, going to jail, ending up fighting with each other. Tearing the community asunder.

It is at once profoundly sad and breathtakingly exciting.  This is the single best piece of sports writing I’ve read this year.  Kudos to Sports Illustrated and Thomas Lake.  [2 on 5]

Anyway, the magazine has selected it’s Seven Greatest Stories and have been nice enough to supply full text!  Woot!  Woot!

Among the stories you’ll find are: Tom Junod’s “Falling Man” (2003), Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966), C.J. River’s “The School” (2006), Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?” (1986), Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson.  Yes!” (1965), John Sack’s “M” (1965) and Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” (1960).

Maybe it’s time to renew that subscription.  I’ve read all of these pieces at one time or another and can’t recommend them highly enough.

Everybody has a story and I can’t stop reading them.

There are so many people out there with such diverse backgrounds and perspectives! It’s absolutely fascinating to me. Have you ever looked at a person and thought, “I wonder what their story is? How did they get to where they are? What are their dreams?” I do. All the time. (Is that weird?) This is my chance to get to know some of them, even if it’s just a glimpse, and share their stories that would otherwise go untold.

Hess is a professor at Rider University, but he’s published two tomes on hip-hop and several short pieces at McSweeney’s and other places.� Anyhow, the question is why should you go see him read.� Well, I haven’t the foggiest and though that’s not the best sales pitch a person can offer, call it a hunch.

I’m about 80 pages (228 total) into Big Wheel and I’m loving every minute of it.� The book is technically creative non-ficiton, which means it’s mostly true in the conventional sense (non of that James Frey shit), but Hess probably changed enough to not get sued or make his family and friends hate him.

Big Wheel is a rollicking adventure of Hess’s early years trying to stay afloat in the world of college teaching.� To do so he takes a bunch of shit jobs like driving an ice cream truck, being a haunted house character and other fringe jobs that offer the benefits of money, flexibility and not caring about the stupid job in the first place.

It’s a light-hearted look dealing with that period in life when you have to go from being a reckless youth to an adult, without sacrificing anything.� That’s hard to do and for some people it just paralyzes them.

Wow, that sounds almost like an intentional blurb for the book?� Yeah, yeah what are you gonna do.� I suppose in a way what I like most about Hess’s writing is that he’s funny and self-aware enough to make great observations about himself and others, but mostly he’s enthusiastic. Punches are not pulled, but there’s very little angst.� We don’t like angsty white men around these parts.� Especially because being a white, angsty male is so 1915-1998.� Humor and enthusiasm counts for a lot, especially when so many people go for the detached irony aesthetic starting around 2001.

It’s hard not to feel like Hess is one of us, just someone doing what they have to do to get by so that he can do what he loves, which is write and consume hip-hop.

If that’s not enough he promises free stuff if you ask him nicely.� I’m going to ask him for a copy of his first book, El Cumpleanos de Paco, which he self-published and gave away to people.� It was a limited run, so hopefully he has one or two left.

When I actually finish the book in it’s entirety, I promise a more thorough review/examination of it.� For now though, it comes highly recommended.� And if you ask nicely, I’ll gladly pass it along once I’m done with it.� I’m sure Mickey wouldn’t have it any other way.

I suggest that to offer that Orwell was more than just his two most famous novels.� He was a superb writer of the highest order.� One need to look no further than his intimate diaries to ascertain his brilliance.� Lucky for us they are available to read.

The Orwell Prize has decided to publish Orwell’s diary – one entry per day 70 years to the day after they were originally written.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9^th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and � above all � how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7^th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell�s perceptive eye and rebellion against the �gramophone mind� he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: �He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry � in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.�

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

That’s a great question.� I like that the diaries, only a few entries in, are diverse.� Some are no longer than a single line, while others read like an ethereal haiku.� This is going to be a wonderful project to follow.

Books about substance abuse are often the most talked about books because they take place in a world that many people begin to travel down at 18-25, but most people make an abrupt U-turn when the realize the stakes involved with continuing down the darkened alley. And let’s be honest, to a certain extent for those who have never been habitual drug users, it’s a fascinating world. One that 80% of people are not privy to.

He’s the rub for The Night of the Gun. David Carr doesn’t trust his memory of those events, so rather than embellish them and become embroiled in some James Frey-type of shit (would you want Oprah bitch-slapping you?) he went out and thoroughly investigated his own life. Pouring over court documents and arrest records and interviewing over sixty people connected to his life at that time. It sounds like heady stuff. Stuff that I can’t wait to dig into.

The New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt this morning of the book titled “Me and My Girls.” It’s breathtaking, simply one of the most outstanding things I’ve read in quite some time.

When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception. How is it that almost every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?

If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we�re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I�m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.

The arc of the addict, warm and familiar as a Hallmark movie with only the details pivoting, is especially tidy in the recollection:

I had a beer with friends.

I shot dope into my neck.

I got in trouble.

I saw the error of my ways.

I found Jesus or 12 steps or bhakti yoga.

Now everything is new again.

In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel better about themselves. (Here�s a taste: When I got to detox for what I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my scabrous, pus-filled track marks. They dropped pills into my mouth from several inches away as if feeding a baby bird, and even the wet-brain drunks wouldn�t come near me. See how that works?)

The book comes out August 5, 2008.

As compiled by the UK’s Telegraph. They’re not too clear on what they consider a “cult book.” Often times it’s hard to differentiate these types of books from say, bestsellers or classics. Also, cult books vary significantly from cult movies. Cult movies tend to be trashy or bad in a way that makes them pleasurably good. But that isn’t the case with cult books. Cult books tend to change our lives in one way or another. They’re the type of books you go clamoring on to your friends about that they have to read it.

“In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

We were able to agree, finally, on one thing: you know a cult book when you see one. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: our appeal for suggestions yielded enough for a list at least three times as long as this one,” they wrote.

Among the books they’ve included are: Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Baby and Child Care by Doctor Spock, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Beaty Myth by Naomi Wolf, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and many more.

It reads like a who’s who of important literature, so much so that many of these novels are considered classics and I would be hesitant to call them cult books. I guess, I wish there were more books on here that were unknowns instead of some obvious choices. Still, you could do worse than reading the books on this list, which works as a fantastic literary primer.

Full list after the jump. We’ve left the original authors’s notes because they indicate a personal attachment to the books, which is sometimes the best endorsement.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Sideways fantasy from the Diogenes of American letters, a comic sage who survived the firebombing of Dresden and various familial tragedies to work out his own unique brand of science-fictional satire. Like much of Vonnegut’s stuff, this is savage anger barely masked by urbane anthropological sarcasm. Very much the place to start. TM

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60)
The great modern Baroque novel. Made it possible for the middle classes to embrace the Mediterranean. No such Alexandria ever existed, nor did the potboiler thriller plot of space/time exploration, Kaballa, sex, good food and drink (it came out during rationing) or philosophical enquiry. Some beautiful sentences, sure; but lots of them don�t make sense. AMcK

A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Plotless, morality-free salute to decadence. An individual based on its French author lounges about his luxurious home indulging in pursuits such as embedding gemstones in the shell of a tortoise until, loaded down, it expires. Dripping with Baudelairean ennui (and not a little dull itself), A Rebours was a bible for the Symbolists, Oscar Wilde and alienated creative types everywhere. SD

Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
Childcare experts go in and out of fashion, but Dr Benjamin Spock remains the daddy of them all. From his reassuring first sentence � “You know more than you think you do” � he revolutionised the way parents thought about their children, asserting the right to cuddle, comfort and follow your instincts. He also tells you how to deal with croup. SC

The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The woman who made feminism sexy by being gorgeous and shaving her legs also taught her readers to eat a hearty meal. This book argues that a cult of thinness has desexualised and disempowered women just when, after the acceptance of free love and the introduction of the contraceptive pill, the opposite should have happened. The most important feminist text of the past 20 years. SD

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
In one of the original misery memoirs, Sylvia Plath delivered an intense, semiautobiographical story of growing up at a time when electroshock therapy was used to treat troubled young women. The narrator is a talented writer who arrives in New York with every opportunity before her, but buckles. The Bell Jar became a rallying call for a better understanding of mental illness, creativity and the impact on women of stifling social conventions. Plath killed herself a month after its publication. CR

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
Bitterly bouncy military farce, responsible for inventing the dilemma to which it gave its name: you’re only excused war if you’re mad, but wanting an exemption argues that you must be sane. Literary history would be entirely different if Heller had followed his original intention and called it Catch-18: it was changed to avoid confusion with a Leon Uris book. TM

The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Ur-text of adolescent alienation, beloved of assassins, emos and everyone in between, Gordon Brown included. Complicated teen Holden Caulfield at large in the big city, working out his family and getting drunk. You’ve probably read it, be honest. TM

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
Deep in the South American jungle an intrepid explorer is about to stumble on a sequence of ancient prophecies that could change our way of living, even save the world. If only we didn�t have to buy the other novels in that the series to find out what they were! For a similar effect on the cheap, rent an Indiana-Jonesalike film � Tomb Raider, say � and ask a hippy to whisper nonsense in your ear while you’re watching it. TM

The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Blame a burgeoning mistrust of conventional psychiatry for the immediate impact of The Dice Man � a novel whose hero, a disillusioned psychiatrist, vows to make every decision of his life according to the roll of a die. As one might have expected from the times, chance sends him into violence and anarchy, which also explains the book�s enduring appeal. AC

Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von D�niken (1968)
Those Easter Island things, they’re blokes wearing space suits, aren�t they? Er, no. Hugely influential work of mad-eyed fabricated Arch & Anth, responsible for decades of pub pseudoscience as well as for splendid stuff such as The X-Files. Increasingly common at jumble sales these days, though Von D�niken happily got another 25 books out of the idea. TM

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
Ignatius J Reilly is a fat anti-hero to thwart Promethean selfdramatisation in any reader. With the medieval poetry of Hroswitha swirling in a head jammed into a green hunting cap with earpieces, Reilly eats steadily, despises modernity, seeks solace in canine fantasies and remembers with terror his one experience of leaving New Orleans. CH

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
In the age of titles such as “No, Please, Daddy, Not There!”, the soul-searching autobiography looks about as cutting edge as a Findus Crispy Pancake. But when Rousseau told his story, confessions had never been so confessional. “I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent,” he declared, rightly. He added, wrongly: “�and which, once complete, will have no imitator.” SL

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
A Calvinist convinced of his indefectible election to salvation is led to acts of murder by Gil-Martin, his devilish doppelganger. More a myth than a religious satire, it vividly survives James Hogg’s not entirely satisfactory manner of recounting it. Consider this: there may be a Gil-Martin near you. CH

Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950)
Do you often feel unhappy? Depressed? Ill at ease with others? You will if you read this. Creepy bit of mind-mechanics by the indifferent sci-fi novelist who founded Scientology. TM

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
The book that launched a thousand trips. William Blake said that if we could cleanse the “doors of perception” we would perceive “the infinite”. Huxley thought mescalin was the way to do so. In this essay, he pops a pill, goes on about “not-self” and “suchness”, and decides love is the ultimate truth. He also took LSD when dying, but hardly stuffed it down the way his fans did. Jim Morrison was one: he named the Doors after Huxley’s book, gobbled mouthfuls of acid and was dead by 27. SD

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
Sandworms, ornithopters, Atreides, Harkonnen and spice: chop and blend for sci-fi fantasy, strangely like an intergalactic cousin of James Clavell. The first in an increasingly soap-operatic sequence. Equally cultishly adapted for the screen by David Lynch, and the root of many a lifelong passion for complex character names and/or arcane ceremonial weaponry. TM

The Hitchhiker�s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
Forget Asimov or PKD. Douglas Adams was so brilliant a visionary that even in the late 1970s he was able to foresee a time when digital watches would look pretty silly. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy � a radio show before it was a novel, and a film, and a game, and a TV show � was incredibly clever and wildly funny. Thanks to the Guide, an entire generation of Britons was nursed to adulthood with the phrases “Don�t Panic” and “Mostly Harmless”, and the number 42. SL

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
New journalism, non-fiction novel � however you define it, Tom Wolfe�s 1968 account of the novelist Ken Kesey�s psychedelic bus ride across America with his “Merry Pranksters” established a style of free-associating, hyperbolic writing (count the exclamation marks!!!) that spawned countless imitations. To a generation of readers it fostered a burning envy that they had not been in San Francisco when the Kool-Aid dispensers were being spiked with “Purple Haze”. Now a vivid social history of a period that seems as remote as Byzantium. MB

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
More 1970s searching for “authenticity” and “selfhood”: a housewife has an affair with a radical psychoanalyst (”Adrian Goodlove”, geddit?) and fantasises about sexual liberation. At the end, though, she goes back to her husband. John Updike called it the most “delicious erotic novel a woman everwrote” � but really, what on earth was all the fuss about? DS

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Women should taste their own menstrual blood to reconcile themselves to their bodies, declared Germaine Greer in the seminal feminist text of the 1970s. Greer told a generation of women that society had turned them into meek, self-hating, castrated clones. The book was an international best-seller which earned Greer a mixed but enduring legacy. CR

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
Bewilderingly popular and extremely silly Nietzschean melodrama, in which Ayn Rand gives her mad arch-capitalist philosophy a run round the block in the person of Howard Roark, a flouncy architect. Loved by the kind of person who tells you selfishness is an evolutionary advantage, before stealing your house/lover/job. TM

G�del, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979)
About what it means to think, and how that happens, this is written in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. Pattern recognition in the work of geniuses. Loved by maths geeks and anybody with Asperger’s syndrome and anyone with sense. But at root a chess textbook. AMcK

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
Europe-hopping comic metanovel of war and power, stuffed with maths, shaggy-dog stories, childish humour and ravishing sentences. And lots of rockets. Genius, though long enough to lie unfinished. TM

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
Similar territory to The Da Vinci Code but earlier, less balefully stupid and with the nerve to claim factual accuracy (its authors took Dan Brown to court and lost). The usual song and dance about Templars, bloodlines of Christ and global conspiracies, but somehow still chilling for all that. Staple text of the bonkers brigade. TM

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
This heady mix of romance and reality opens with its teenage heroine Cassandra Mortmain writing while sitting in the kitchen sink. It ends with the words “I love you” scribbled in the margins of the imaginary journal that forms the substance of the novel. In between a story unfolds that feeds the fantasies of every lovelorn young girl; but its status owes much to the way that, as in life, things don�t end happily ever after. SC

If on a Winter�s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
A book composed of the first chapters from other invented books. Either a classic work of literary snakes and ladders or a tiresomely recursive bit of postmodern sterility depending on your interlocutor. Italo Calvino was arguably better elsewhere. TM

Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
For decades, the cowed menfolk of the world ambled about in pinafores, dusting ornaments and saying “yes, dear”. Then Robert Bly wrote Iron John, invented mythopoetic masculinity, and the daft creatures all rushed off into the woods together, hugged, bellowed, wept, painted their furry parts blue and felt re-empowered to wee standing up. SL

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970)
The book that gave 1970s idealism a bad name, the nauseating story of a seagull who defies his fellows to soar into the heavens. “The only true law,” the bird solemnly tells us, “is that which leads to freedom.” Richard Nixon’s FBI director, L Patrick Gray, ordered all his staff to read it. Later, he resigned for gross corruption, a fitting punishment for his dreadful taste. DS

The Magus by John Fowles (1966)
Posh young teacher goes to idyllic Greek island, there to be exquisitely tormented by young women and a Prospero-like figure. Like most John Fowles, this is solid middlebrow dressed as highbrow, but stunning setdressing, TS Eliot quotations and a twist at the end guaranteed a lifelong place in the hearts of a certain type of bookish male. TM

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
Miniature literary mindwarps from the world’s most famous blind librarian, a writer � like Kafka � whose work, once encountered, adds a new adjective to the mental lexicon. Unforgettable stuff, after which mazes and mirrors will never be the same again. Often beloved of the kind of person who agrees with its author that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition”, and none the worse for that. TM

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
A thing of beauty, the sole bequest of the last in the line of Sicilian aristocrats on whom the novel is based. An ineradicable elegy for a vanished society, and, despite its risorgimento setting, still the best psychological and botanical guidebook to parts of southern Italy. TM

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
Satan live and in person, a mansized black cat, a magician and his helpmeet, Pontius Pilate� Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you�ll struggle to find a Russian who hasn’t read it. Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper. TM

No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
Few books have caught a political moment better than Naomi Klein�s stylish and impassioned report on the abuses of brands, and the activists who fight them. It was published in 2000, just as “antiglobalisation” crashed into the mainstream, and Klein was adopted as its poster-girl. SL

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Supposedly filled in under three caffeine-fuelled weeks, the roll of paper on which Kerouac typed his seminal novel recently sold for more than two million dollars, and has spent the past few years on the road itself, travelling from museum to museum in the US, where it attracts queues of bearded jazz fanatics. It is the result of seven years of road-trips across America during the 1940s. Initially it celebrates the alternative lifestyle, although by the end it is coloured by disappointment. TC

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
Needs little introduction. Bad craziness as the Duke of Gonzo and his helpless attorney blaze a streak of pharmaceutical havoc across 1970s California, all in demented bar-fight prose and fever-dream set-pieces. Now also a core text for ex-public school drug bores, which tends to obscure the anarchic excellence of HST’s journalistic talent. TM

The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
Required reading in the coffee bars of the East Midlands in the late 1950s; unbelievably, some people paid good money for this study of the outsider figure in Western literature. The TLS found 285 mistakes in a sample of 249 lines, but in its young author�s eyes, it confirmed him as “the major literary genius of our century”. Modesty was not one of his virtues; nor, sadly, was literary ability. DS

The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923)
Pocket-sized set of aphorisms that sound like they were written by a medieval monk but were actually the product of a Lebanese-American alcoholic who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1931. The Prophet is a beautifully phrased exercise in pointing out the obvious but Sixties hippy kids loved it. SD

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Americans had Upton Sinclair, and we had Robert Tressell � the pen-name of painter and decorator Robert Noonan, chosen because it sounded like one of the tools of his trade. Tressell’s posthumously published saga of “12 months in hell” with the exploited working classes � their trousers the victims of poverty and their minds the victims of false consciousness � is a totemic text of British socialism. SL

The Rub�iy�t of Omar Khayy�m tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
This is among the best-selling volumes of poetry of all time, and does all that a translation should: it introduces the idea of an exotic, different culture; and it expresses what its readers feel, but lets them blame it on someone else. Here, in an age of doubt, aesthetics and Darwinism, these mysterious verses, drawn from 11th-century Persian, stand as little examples of how to celebrate life even as it slips away. TP

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Modern travel writers such as Colin Thubron and Bruce Chatwin were inspired by Robert Byron. Travelling through the Middle East and Asia in the 1930s, Byron provides detailed descriptions of Islamic architecture, with pungent asides: “The Arabs hate the French more than they hate us. Having more reason to do so, they are more polite; in other words, they have learnt not to try it on, when they meet a European. This makes Damascus a pleasant city from the visitor’s point of view.” SR

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
Hermann Hesse�s allegorical novel sounds a bit Buddhist but is actually saying that experience (including of wealth), rather than contemplation, is the key to enlightenment. It’s persuasive, especially if you read it, as many do, chillum in hand, in the Himalayas. Although, thinking about it now, profundities such as “the secret of the river is there is no time” don’t make much sense out of context. SD

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
The book that was supposed to have lovelorn young men reaching for their guns. Even if it didn�t inspire as many suicides as people thought, it�s still a vital work. As Werther tromps about the countryside, reading Homer and Ossian and agonising over his host’s wife, he shows how much you’re allowed to feel in the Romantic age Goethe did so much to invent. Before he smashed the Mamelukes, Napoleon said he wished he�d written it (and surely so did the Mamelukes). TP

Story of O by Pauline R�age (1954)
Deliberately discomforting, Story of O takes as its subject the objectification of women. O is a beautiful woman who submits to the sadistic whims of various men after she is kidnapped and taken to a chateau to be blindfolded, whipped, branded and pierced. It ends with an odd sense of triumph, O wearing nothing but a mask before a group of strangers. Bewildering, creepy and joyless, it’s a guaranteed detumescent. TC

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
“Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don�t know.” The beach, the sun, the Arab, the gunshots, the chaplain: the stuff of millions of adolescents’ fevered imaginings. If you don’t love this when you’re 17, there�s something wrong with you. In the film Talladega Nights, Sacha Baron Cohen’s snooty French racing driver reads it on the starting grid. Strange but true: George W Bush read it on holiday two years ago. DS

The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968)
Take an enterprising anthropology student (Castaneda) and a Mexican shaman (Don Juan), mix in liberal quantities of peyote, and you end up with a text rooted in “nonordinary reality”. Castaneda’s multi-part account of his adventures, which started to appear in 1968, and includes lessons in how to fly and talk to coyotes, has always elicited queries as to its veracity. But when you�ve taken that many drugs, it may not matter. AC

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
A record of a lost generation in the shape of the contemporaries Vera Brittain loved and lost in the First World War, this memoir is also a poignant, passionate and perfectly poised study of a woman trying to find her place in a changing world. A bible to the generation who read it on publication, its influence continues thanks to a Virago reprint. SC

Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
Incendiary declamation through a megaphone. If only one knew what he was on about. Put six Nietzscheans in a room and it ought to be a bloodbath; except, since they’re all nancies who fancy themselves as Supermen, there wouldn’t be one. Nietzsche was brave and mad enough to kill God: but look what happened to him. His acolytes are, largely, less brave. AMcK

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
Economical Deep South drama around perennially hot-button racial questions, further exalted in literary mythology by being the only thing its author ever wrote. Even those who think they haven�t read it often have. TM

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)
Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he�d done Greek at school and knew what “ar�te” meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s. AMcK