Books I Recommend

Non-Fiction

• Black, Jack: You Can't Win

  The autobiography of a turn-of-the-century American "yegg," hobo, small-time thief and opium addict. Well-written, with an informal grace, an evocative phrasing, and an engaging subject-matter. This book was an early influence on William S. Burroughs, giving him the prototype for his book Junky as well as the character Salt Chunk Mary and the concept of the "Johnson Family."

• Blackmore, Susan: The Meme Machine

  Finally, a book on meme theory written for a general audience that is both careful in its analysis and appropriately far-reaching in its discussion of the implications of the concept of memetic selection in arenas such as epistemology, consciousness theory, and human evolution. There are some other writings by Blackmore on-line. Check this page.

• Bloom, Howard: The Lucifer Principle

  Subtitled "a scientific expedition into the forces of history," this is a semi-heretical look at our curious species using sociobiology, meme theory, and facts that don't fit well into consensus reality (did you know that tuberculosis cases declined by 97% between 1800 and 1945 - before antibiotics came into the picture?). Bloom believes that like ants, bees, and slime molds, human beings join as individuals into assemblages of distributed pseudo-tissue in a larger "superorganism" - and that the traits of this superorganism are the understudied key to our history and destiny. The book has its own web page, naturally.

• Brunvand, Jan Harold

  Folklore continues to be rich and thematically wide-ranging in modern times, and American folklore isn't just mildewy old stuff like George Washington and the Cherry Tree. If you ever read alt.folklore.urban, you know what I'm talking about: Urban legends, the kind we all know and love (and frequently believe). Brunvand has been a tireless cataloguer of this sort of "it happened to a friend of a friend of mine" folklore. His books include: American Folklore: An Encyclopedia The Baby Train and other Lusty Urban Legends The Big Book of Urban Legends The Choking Doberman: And Other 'New' Urban Legends Curses! Broiled Again!: The Hottest Urban Legends Going The Mexican Pet The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings

• Daly, Martin and Wilson, Margo: Homicide

  Applied sociobiology - in this case, applied to the problem of homicide. Why do people kill other people? Well, there are many reasons, and if you look at the statistics, most of them conform to some degree at least with predictions that would be made from applying sociobiological concepts to the problem. Here's some sociobiology and some of Wilson & Daly's ongoing research.

• Dawkins, Richard: The Selfish Gene

  You may think you understand the theory of evolution, but if you're like most people, you probably have profound misunderstandings about the theory. Reading this book will get you back on the right track. The theory of evolution still hasn't been absorbed by consensus reality, and this is too bad, because it has a lot to teach us about who we are, what we're doing here, and what the nature of life and our environment must be. I give this book my highest recommendation. There's also a very good Dawkins site on the Web.

• Foreman, Dave: Ecodefense

  The practical, non-fiction counterpart to Edward Abbey's The Monkeywrench Gang. This book is called "A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching" and it tells you everything you need to know about toppling billboards, disabling vehicles, spiking trees, and performing the sort of guerrilla terrorism necessary, according to those sympathetic with the author, to defend Mother Earth. As a practical guide for people who want to fight for a cause unlikely to ever have the necessary army, I recommend it.

• Gardner, Martin: Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science

  A romp through the curious worlds occupied by influential crank scientists - worlds in which the earth is flat or hollow, and invisible orgone radiation will help us undo our prenatal mental implants and fend off the saucer people. You'll recognize many of the names (L. Ron Hubbard, Wilhelm Reich, Immanuel Velikovsky) and be first introduced to many others. Gardner acknowledges that there is a broad grey area between crank science and orthodox science where wild (but perhaps true) theories live, and that often orthodox science is just plain wrong, but he insists that there is a well-defined and identifiable arena for cranks. He shows no overt sympathy for these loonys, but his affection for their eccentricities shines through. The book was published in the 1950s, and so is slightly dated, but I wouldn't let this stop you. You can find Gardner's take on Dianetics on-line.

• Harris, Marvin: Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches

  Cows are inefficiently raised and devoured in the United States, while in India, people would rather go hungry than eat cow flesh. In the Jewish and Moslem tradition, pigs are unclean and cannot be consumed; while in others, gargantuan pig feasts are more holy than the Thanksgiving turkey. Is this just part of the inexplicable side of human nature, or are there understandable reasons for these cultural curiosities? Harris shows that these bizarre displays of cultural variety play an important and understandable role in the cultures' environments. Here's a review of Harris's "Cultural Materialism".

• Kuhn, Thomas S.: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

  Kuhn did science a great service by debunking the linear history of science - the story in which all of history's scientists are slowly accumulating knowledge and abandoning superstition in a quest for today's interpretation of reality, which is on a steady trajectory for Truth. Kuhn shows us that this story is a complete fiction based on a regular re-writing of history with every scientific revolution. According to Kuhn, new paradigms (and if you've ever used the word "paradigm" - it's his fault) of data interpretation arise and become popular in a sort of punctuated evolution. He cautiously understates the epistomological consequences for science in this essay, but you can read between the lines and see your faith in science not shattered but certainly changed for the better. Here's a good summary that Malcolm R. Forster put together.

• Lee, Joe: The History of Clowns For Beginners

  I think the For Beginners series of books makes for great public transportation reading, though the quality varies. The best one I've seen so far is The History of Clowns. This one hops from the trickster god motif to fools, jesters, comedians, yippies and of course clowns. Trace back Pee Wee Herman's family tree and find Diogines the Cynic.

• Littlejohn, Duffy: Hopping Freight Trains in America

  San Luis Obispo local Duffy Littlejohn has written a terrific handbook for the modern-day hobo. If you're interested in starting this rewarding and inexpensive hobby, start by reading the good advice and evocative folklore here. Here's a train-hopping article by Wes Modes, with whom I've hopped a freight or two.

• Ludlow, Fitz Hugh: The Hasheesh Eater

  When Fitz Hugh Ludlow was a teenager in the middle of the 19th Century, he discovered the psychedelic universe by self-administering overdoses of a cannabis lockjaw remedy known as "Tilden's Extract." His descriptions of his experiences are the most sophisticated and thorough accounts of the notoriously indescribable psychedelic dimension that I have ever seen - no contest.

  • The book is no longer in print, but you can read the whole thing on-line at The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Hypertext Collection.

• MacDougall, Curtis D.: Hoaxes

  Throughout history, impostors, pranksters, and swindlers have cooked up counterfeits, frauds, and hoaxes that have confused, impoverished and entertained millions. Curtis MacDougall's book is densely packed with details about these schemes and schemers. I've got an eccentric love for this area of history and have read many books on this subject, and this was by far the best. It may be out of print, but see if you can find a copy.

  • You really should check out the Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia.

• Mackay, Charles: Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

  This classic, first published in 1841, is a chronicle of some of the more prominent lunacies ever to sweep a culture. Included are in-depth studies of The Crusades, the Dutch tulipomania, various proto-capitalist bubbles, the Euro-American witch hunts, prophets and alchemists, and slow poisoners. I cover some of the same stuff on my Culture Jamming page, but not in such detail.

• McKenna, Terence

  I'm not going to lie to you: Terence McKenna believed that he was trading valuable memes with self-transforming machine elves from a parallel dimension and that the world as we know it will end in 2012. So, why do I hang on every word this guy said? McKenna was a brilliant and imaginative thinker, and if you're capable of swallowing his particular brand of nonsense, you're liable to find it a very nourishing meal indeed. I'd start with Food of the Gods, which is sparing on the apocalyptic gremlins. You can find some of his writings and transcripts of his lectures on-line, also - I've made a pretty good index of these myself.

• McKibben, Bill: The Age of Missing Information

  McKibben got a group of friends to tape all 24 hours of television available on the 103 channels in his area and then he watched every hour. After he recovered from this media deluge, he wrote about his experience and compared it to 24 hours spent far away from a television screen. Fascinating and well-written. I bought an extra copy just to loan out to people. McKibben notes that The Earth Does a Slow Burn in this editorial.

• Niman, Michael I.: People of the Rainbow: A Nomadic Utopia

  The rainbow gatherings are periodic autonomous zones of as many as 20,000 or more people that have no organizational hierarchy and no restrictions on membership. As such, they're a very atypical utopian community, and it defies expectations that they've managed to thrive and to grow into an international movement since 1972. This book is a scholarly look at the rainbow gathering phenomena, describing its history and sociology, and comparing it to other utopian experimental communities. For more information on rainbow gatherings, check out Welcome Home!

• Opie, Iona & Opie, Peter: The Lore and Language of School Children

  This book traces slang, game rules, social conventions, superstitions, rhymes, and jokes of schoolchildren in the British isles across generations, making observations as to how this remarkably stable and fertile memetic ecosystem behaves.

• Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo: Inevitable Illusions

  Reason is a wonderful thing, but, unfortunately perhaps, we were designed by natural selection to survive and not by Intel to compute. There are ways in which human brains are consistently fooled - in some circumstances we are doomed to act in undeniably silly and suboptimal ways. This book gives clear illustrations of some of these cognitive blind spots through puzzles and games.

• Reps, Paul & Senzaki, Nyogen: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings

  You're not supposed to get anything out of Zen, so don't look at a collection like this as a shortcut to somewhere, or as a Cliff Notes version of wrestling with koans. It's a collection of stories, epigrams, illustrations and anecdotes that gives a blackbox version of what the mindset of Zen is like. You can find the "10 Bulls" parable, which is included (with illustrations) in this book, on-line at this page.

• Spiegelman, Art: Maus

  A cartoonist has a difficult relationship with his father, a holocaust survivor. He wants to learn the story of his father's experiences during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Maus is both of these stories, and they're told in a compelling way through the initially disarming conceit of cartoon Jewish mice, German cats, Polish pigs and the like. Here's some more detailed information on-line.

• Stamets, Paul: Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World

  Every other mushroom-hunting guide on the shelves has only a handful of the good mushrooms in their listings, most labeled "poisonous." Feh! Useless. This guide, however, is nothing but magic mushrooms, and has all of the necessary details on every variety imaginable, is well-illustrated, and expertly written. Check out Stamets's Fungi Perfecti pages.

• Szasz, Thomas: The Manufacture of Madness

  This book shows how the "mentally ill" category serves as a form of social control that has evolved directly from the category of "heretic." Although psychiatry uses the language of medicine, it has been more commonly used as a justification for the involuntary incarceration and remolding of behavioral deviants. The "diseases" that psychiatry discovers are defined not by their nature as medical pathology, but by their behavioral symptoms which are defined as "disease" in order to prohibit or suppress them. Online, you can find Dr. Szasz's The Case Against Psychiatic Coercion.

• Thoreau, Henry David: Walden

  The American Transcendentalist movement of the early 19th Century was more than we deserved at the time, although with the Civil War, perhaps we atoned later for our sins. Walden is thought made beautiful through words, a book that pacifies without tranquilizing, and that spurs energy and action without tempting frenzy. Pick up an edition that also contains (as many do) his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience." Here's the Project Gutenberg Etext of Walden and an online version of Civil Disobedience.

• Vale, V., ed.: Re:Search #11: Pranks

  If you like my Culture Jamming pages, you'll love this book - it's full of interviews with folks like Kathy Acker, Alan Abel, Jello Biafra, Joey Skaggs, Abbie Hofmann, and Coyle & Sharpe talking about their own versions of poetic terrorism. Time for another plug for the Culture Jammer's Encyclopedia.

• Winn, Ian: The Techno-Pagan Octopus Messiah

  Okay, so maybe some of the reason I love this book is because I lived through some of it, but I don't feel at all hesitant about recommending it even to people who don't know Ian and haven't caught the Octopus Messiah bug yet. It's being sold as a novel, but those of us who were there, man know that it's All True and that Ian's showing us the Way to make it into the new millennium with our prosperity stones intact. Check out the web site.

Fiction

• Adams, Douglas: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

  If you haven't read this yet, you should put that damn mouse down right now, turn off the monitor, and go get a copy at the nearest used book store. It's one of the few books to win the coveted Laugh Out Loud award from yours truly. The book has a sizeable web presence.

• Burroughs, William S.

  Read Naked Lunch first, and see if it's your kind of thing. Narcotics probably would assist reading comprehension. If you like that, move on to Junky or Queer (both of these are more traditional narratives in form) or whatever else suits your fancy. Burroughs's styles can take some getting used to, and you can't really expect him to meet you half-way in the comprehension department in much of his work. Here's an excerpt from Naked Lunch: "Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?"

• Camus, Albert

  I didn't have a much clearer idea of what existentialism is all about after having read a few of Camus's novels, but I will say it was a good read. Some info on Camus can be found at this page. I give a thumbs up to: The Plague The Stranger (okay, Cure fans, find out what he's singing about)

• Gide, Andre: The Immoralist

  And I thought William S. Burroughs invented the whole North African artistic pederasty tour idea. You don't hear much about this Nobel Prize winning author these days, but perhaps you should. Gide wrestles with the popular philosophies of the mid to late 19th Century, which seem to leave us without any guidance, through the protagonist of this book. There's a web page about Gide.

• Hemingway, Ernest

  A prose style honed by newspaper journalism and fired by the disillusionment of the first world war. It seems like Hemingway has disintegrated in popular culture into an icon of absurdly macho posturing, but this image won't survive your first immersion into his writings. The way a Zen painting can capture a jumping frog or a landscape in a handful of brush-strokes, Hemingway picks the minimum of simple sentences to fully flesh out a mood. There are a couple of Hemingway pages on the web, such as this one. I recommend the following as his 'A' list: The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls The Old Man and the Sea The Sun Also Rises

• Hesse, Hermann

  You can almost feel the beads of sweat on Hermann's forehead as he tries to distill his philosophical quest into a fictional hero's tale. His protagonists are Moorcockian "Eternal Champions" wrestling with the existential dilemma in environments ranging from a 20th century drug scene to a quiet monastic order to an ancient Hindu kingdom. You can find some Hesse stuff on the web, at places like this page. Of his novels, I would most recommend the following: Steppenwolf Siddhartha The Journey to the East

• Kerouac, Jack: The Dharma Bums

  He's more famous for On the Road, but my favorite of his novels is The Dharma Bums, perhaps because it opens with the protagonist hopping a freight train through the San Luis Obispo yards. Here's a link to a decent Kerouac page.

• Sim, Dave: Cerebus

  It looks like a comic book, and to call it a "graphic novel" is to make it sound like a comic book with pretensions. To say that it's wonderful and profound literature is to prepare to apologize for the fact that it's about an aardvark named Cerebus and his encounters (in a world as fleshed-out and full of intrigue as any of Zelazny's or Tolkein's) with characters bearing uncanny resemblances to the Marx Brothers, Margaret Thatcher, Mick Jagger, The Tick, and Oprah Winfrey. How about I just say that you won't be sorry you picked it up, until you learn that it'll cost you three figures to get your hands on all of the existing story books. Find out more about Cerebus on-line at this page.

• Thompson, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  Like a water strider skipping on the surface of the american dream just ahead of the oil slick that's going to break the surface tension and sweep him huddled and graceless into the soggy depths... Oh, never mind. Just read it some time. And check out The Great Thompson Hunt.

• Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Lord of the Rings

  There's a reason why this is a classic. Take some time out of your busy schedule and sit down with a warm cup of something and read 'em. And keep the machine close by so you can cross-reference with The J.R.R. Tolkien Information Page.

• Updike, John: Trust Me

  I've read more John Updike than I can remember, mostly because the plot goes in one eye and out the other. I read Updike because the man uses words like Buddy Guy uses a guitar or Einstein uses a differential equation. He writes sentences that convey thoughts we mere mortals couldn't get across in a chapter. This collection of short stories, mostly concerning the ordinary dramas of the modern New England upper-middle class, shows off his talent best, I feel. What do you know; there's a web page called The Centurian "for John Updike information and discussion."

• Vassi, Marco: The Stoned Apocalypse

  Vassi has quite a reputation as an erotic writer, but with this one, I was too busy flipping the pages to fondle myself. It's a story that may cause you to erupt in laughter or cringe in embarassment as the protagonist goes from the guru con to the drugs con to the sex con to the psychology con (where he nearly goes stark raving sane working in a mental hospital). On-line, you can find Vassi's essay "The Metasexual Manifesto."

Poetry

• Larrovitch, Feodor Vladimir: Vyvodne

  Richardson Wright's translations seem all most authentic to me.

• FitzGerald, Edward: The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

  FitzGerald did such significant creative work on the foundation of Khayyám's rubáiyát that he can hold on to authorship credit for his translation. Poor Khayyám reaches out from nearly a millennium in the past and cannot tell that he touches me.