Life as Literature
As of late, I’m not reading nearly enough. I’m not even reading that many comics lately, so you know my regular reading is suffering. To this point, I decided last night to come up with the 15-20 books that defined who I am. These are the books that shaped my view of the world or at least have defined how I see and relate to the world on a daily basis. As I started trying to prepare this list, which is really just an easy way for me to see what I want to read again, I realized that I miss how much I use to read. Guess I need to take care of that. So, in no particular order, here’s the list:
William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch
Friedrich Nietzsche – The Gay Science
Arthur Rimbaud – A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat
William Blake – Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Milan Kundera – Life is Elsewhere
Henry Miller – Tropic of Cancer
William Gibson – Neuromancer
Charles Bukowski – The Last Night of the Earth Poems
Martin Heidegger – The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays
Martin Heidegger – Poetry, Language, Thought
Frank Herbert – Dune
Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged
Tom Robbins – Another Roadside Attraction
Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot
Jean Genet – Our Lady of the Flowers
Milan Kundera – The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Robert A. Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land
Phillip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spake Zarathustra
William S. Burroughs – The Ticket That Exploded
The funny part about such lists is realizing, afterward, some of the other books you’d put on there. For example, there’s no Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Wittgenstein, all of which shaped my life in different ways. I could also list every book by Burroughs and Genet, and all the poetry of Rimbaud, the major works of Joyce, or the non-sense novels of Beckett. Like all lists, this one fails to really capture anything other than what is currently floating through my head, and the way I feel at this particular moment.