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

Andy Wilson
2023-01-19