An alternative to those quizzes about how many dead Victorians you’ve read in the pursuit of cultural capital, a canonical education and the admiration of loved ones. Instead, here’s a list of 100 books that shaped me.
If you want to be a different fish, you have to jump out of the school
Captain Beefheart
Louis Aragon, Benjamin Peret, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy
1929: Mad Balls
Antonin Artaud
50 Drawings to Murder Magic
Nigel Smith
A Collection of Ranter Writings
Anton Pannekoek
A History of Astronomy
John Zerzan
A People’s History of Civilisation
Arthur Rimbaud
A Season in Hell / Illuminations
Guy Debord
A Sick Planet
Ken Hollings
The Space Oracle: A Guide to Your Stars
Jacques Camatte
Against Domestication
Paul Feyerabend
Against Method
Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Smith
American Magus
Boria Sax
Animals in the Third Reich
Frances Yates
The Art of Memory
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
Ben Watson
Art, Class and Cleavage
Frank Ridley
The Assassins
Flann O’Brien
At Swim Two Birds
Ken Fox
Azmud
Max Ernst
Beyond Painting
Samuel Coleridge
Biographical Literaria
Wyndham Lewis
Blast I-III
Basil Bunting
Briggflatts
William Burroughs
Burroughs Live: Collected Interviews 1960-1997
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Carlo Ginzberg
The Cheese and the Worms
Norbert Elias
The Civilising Process
Morris Berman
Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West
Sean Bonney
The Commons
Attar
The Conference of the Birds
Cornelius Castoriadis
Crossroads in the Labyrinth
Hans Richter
Dada: Art and Anti-art
Ken Weller
Don’t be a Soldier
Iain Sinclair
Downriver
Karl Marx
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
William Burroughs
Electronic Revolution
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Louis-Auguste Blanqui
Eternity by the Stars
Alfred Jarry
Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, Pataphysician
James Joyce
Finnegans Wake
Olaf Stapledon
First and Last Men p
Slim Brundage
From Bughouse Square to Beat Generation
Austin Osman Spare
From the Inferno to Zos
Michel Serres
Genesis
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola
The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century
Mervyn Peake
Gormenghast
Arthur Lovejoy
The Great Chain of Being
Glenn Alexander Magee
Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition
Herodotus
The Histories
Jacques Rancière
The Ignorant Schoolmaster
David Jones
In Parenthesis
Peter Kingsley
In the Dark Places of Wisdom
Karl Kraus
In These Great Times
R D Laing
Knots
Samuel Beckett
Krapp’s Last Tape
Roger Caillois
La Lecture des Pierre’s / The Writing of Stones
Andre Breton, Phillipe Soupault
Magnetic Fields
Edward Thompson
The Making of the English Working Class
Thewelett
Male Fantasies
Boris Groys
The Man Who Flew Into Space From His Apartment
Andre Breton
Manifestos of Surrealism
William Blake
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Charles Olson
Maximus Poems
Theodor Adorno
Minima Moralia
René Daumal
Mount Analogue
Raoul Vaneigem
The Movement of the Free Spirit
William Burroughs
The Naked Lunch
Meyer Abrams
Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature
C L R James
Notes on Dialectics
Ernst Junger
On Pain
Various
On the Passage of a few People Through a rather Brief Moment in Time
University of Strasbourg Students
On the Poverty of Student Life
Guy Debord
Panegyric
John Milton
Paradise Lost
G W F Hegel
The Phenomenology of Spirit
Jeremy Prynne
Poems
Jonathan Barnes
The Presocratic Philosophers
Alice Becker-Ho
The Essence of Jargon
Brion Gysin
The Process
Samuel Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Edward Upward
The Rotten Elements
Georges Bataille
The Sacred Conspiracy
René Girard
The Scapegoat
Ben Watson
Shitkicks and Doughballs
Various
The Situationist International Anthology
Guy Debord
The Society of the Spectacle
Gregory Bateson
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
A E Falconar
Sufi Literature and the Journey to Immortality
Mary Ann Caws
The Surrealist Painters and Poets
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Wyndham Lewis
Time and Western Man
Conrad Hal Waddington
Tools for Thought
Jean-Michel Mension
The Tribe
James Joyce
Ulysses
The Upanishads
William Blake
Vala / The Four Zoas
William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Georges Bataille
Visions of Excess I-III
Ernst Friedrich
War Against War
Theodore Roszak
Where the Wasteland Ends
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
2023-01-19