SG Reading List

As a lifelong book nerd, former schoolteacher and current English grad student, one of the things I have always loved about this site is its embrace of all types of art and culture, including literature. As someone who once spent a summer as a teenager reading through the books that were featured on the CD jacket of Rage Against the Machine's Evil Empire album, I think it should be the duty for each generation of free-thinking folks to pass down a list of "essential" books to the next generation of disaffected teenagers. Therefore, I am proposing the creation of an SG reading list of books that people of our persuasion should read. They can be classic or current, mainstream or counter-cultural, but they should be books that have affected you in some profound way.

Here are my contributions:

1) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

2) On the Road by Jack Kerouac

3) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick


• Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson


• A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking


• The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis


• The Stand by Stephen King


• Imajica by Clive Barker

That's the only book of his I haven't read yet. I really need to get around to it.

i like many of the books youve mentioned but i've been reading all new books lately

I'll add:

The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
Dreamers of Decadence - Philippe Jullian
The Occult - Colin Wilson
Les Fleurs Du Mal - Charles Baudelaire

I agree with a whole bunch of the titles above. Haven't read all of them, but I agree with the ones I have read.

A couple I'll add to the list:

Microserfs - Douglas Coupland
Yellow Dog - Martin Amis
Nunt - Mingus Tourette

There are a whole tonne of others I could recommend, but those are among my favourites.

The Divine Comedy- Dante Alighieri
Faust - Goethe
Romeo and Juliet- Shakespeare
The Hitch-hickers guide to the galaxy- Douglas Adams

The City in History - Lewis Mumford

The Autobiograpy of Malcolm X - Malcolm X

The Production of Space - Henri Lefebvre

Hind Swaraj - Gandhi

Democracy and Its Critics - Robert Dahl

Perdido Street Station - China Mieville

i fatty- jerry stahl
me talk pretty one day- david sederis
mercy among the children - richard david adams
siddhartha - herman hesse
damien- herman hesse
the wasp factory - iain banks

i could go on for days....

Wow, great list so far. Thanks everybody.

One I meant to add in the original post and I can't believe I forgot : Perks of Being a Wallflower.

This one is special to me because, when I was teaching high school, one of my students recommended it to me and suggested we make it part of the curriculum. Then, completely independent of that, one of the other teachers at the school became a minor celebrity around here by crusading to have the book removed from the AP Recommended Reading list because her daughter had read it and was offended (she was not forced to read it mind you, but it was just on a list of books they could choose to do a report on).

The student who recommended it to me was later expelled for taping a tampon to that teacher's door. God I miss that kid.

Anyway, thanks again and keep the suggestions coming.

The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
The Satanic Bible - Anton LaVey

Do you happen to know why she was offended?

~segue~

This list cannot go on without mentioning Catcher in the Rye.

Also:
The Bell Jar
Cat's Cradle
The Great Gatsby
Invisible Man

and I'll think of some more.

I don't know about profound but these books really made me think:

1. Moneyball by Michael Lewis (at least as a lifetime baseball fan)
2. Paradise Lost by John Milton
3. Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer (if you're interested in religious fanaticism, this is the book for you)
4. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
5. A Hero's Life: The Joe DiMaggio biography by Richard Ben Cramer

I read tons of fiction too but these are non-fiction and really made me think about the way things are or re-think things I thought I knew so much about.

Brighton Rock

There are so many.....

Civilization and its Discontents--Freud
Walden--Thoreau
Moviegoer--Walker Percy
Blue Highways--William Least Heat Moon
American Dreams Lost and Found--Studs Terkel

Keep up the good works folks.

using "affected me in a profound way" as the criteria, i would add, in no particular order...


1984 Orwell
The Immense Journey Eiseley
Iron John Bly
Fahrenheit 451 Bradbury
Catch 22 Heller
The Naked Ape Morris
The Three Musketeers Dumas
Le Morte D'Arthur Mallory
Oedipus Rex Sophocles

As Simple As Snow- Gregory Galloway

er who are our type? But anyway these are a few of my favourite books

God is a Bullet - Boston Teran

Around the World in 80 Days - Jules Verne

Kung Fu High School - Ryan Gattis

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Blue Movie -Terry Southern

Preacher - Garth Ennis

That will do for now

"American Gods" and "Sandman" graphic novels - Neil Gaiman

Neuromancer - William Gibson

Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera