Reading List

Roger Deakin, Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees
Richard Manning, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization'
Howard Buten, When I Was Five I Killed Myself
Amir D. Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph - Pythagoras, Bolzano, Kabbalah, etc
George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life
Muriel Spark, The Dirver's Seat - The funniest book about killing someone for no real reason that I can remember reading.
Paul Roberts, The End of Food - I don't know how anyone could eat meat after reading this.  Terrifying and inspiring.
Lewis Carrol, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Actually a lot cleverer than you think it is.
Alistair Gentry, Their Heads are Anonymous - Picked this up at my local second-hand stall for 50p.  Sadomasochism and alien abduction in a theme park.  Great bedtime story.
Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful
John Burnside, The Dumb House
Bill Darlinson, The Gospel and the Zodiac - The Gospel of Mark as astrological allegory
Zoltan Itsvan, The Transhumanist Wager - A terribly written book that's nevertheless creating some heat in transhumanist circles. Rather like a 21st-century Atlas Shrugged (yes, that bad) as Hollywood Blockbuster, it's nevertheless the clearest expression of atheistic transhumanism taken to its most extreme conclusion that I've found.
Joseph Heath, The Rebel Sell: How Counter Culture Became Consumer Culture
Philip K Dick, Valis - The empire never ended.
James Joyce, Finnegans Wake - "...mind never mend..."
Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom and Reality - Fascinating and highly readable studies of presocratic philosophy as shamanism, pretentious in all the right ways and against the grain of contemporary scholarship on the subject.  Puts Parmenides, et al on the pedestal far higher than merely the one labelled 'father of Western logic'.  The truth appears to be far more complex, and far more interesting.
Roger A. Ekirch, At Day's Close: Night in Times Past
Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, TRANSCEND: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever - and they do actually mean forever.  Remarkable.
Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near - Everyone should read this book.  Why and how we are very soon to become post-biological superhumans.  Extremely convincing, actually.
Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent - Books shouldn't actually be allowed to be this interesting.
Benson Bobrick, The Fated Sky: Astrology in History  - Is astrology bollocks?  Well, yes and no...
Albert Camus, The Outsider and The Myth of Sysiphus - You're not a real person if you haven't read either of these.
Patrick Harpur, The Philosophers' Secret Fire and The Secret Tradition of the Soul
Robert Guffey, Cryptoscatlogy: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous - The second best book I have ever read.
Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows - Just because they don't have brains, doesn't mean they don't know what you're up to.
Flavia Arzeni, An Education in Happiness - The Lessons of Hesse and Tagore
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death - Even back in 1985, some people had worked out that you should never watch television.
Carl Jung, Flying Saucers - A modern myth of things seen in the sky
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest - Tennis, etc.
Thomas Pynchon, V and Against the Day - I like long books.  Not all long books - but I've yet to read a Thomas Pynchon book I didn't like, and most of his books are long.
Roberto Bolano, 2666 - Artist uses his own arm as part of a painting, and a recipe for brussel sprouts with lemon, given during a sermon.  Among other things.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five, Armageddon in Retrospect and Timequake
Richard Adams, Watership Down - Psychic rabbits and death.  For kids.
Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A FInancial History of the World
Dixe Wills, The Z to Z of Great Britain - The definitive guide to all the towns in our great nation that begin with the last letter of our great alphabet.
Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception - Posh dystopian prophet accident invents the 1960s.  Nothing suspicious about that.
Terence Mckenna, The Archaic Revival  and  Food of the Gods
Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-listening and other Moodsong
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!
Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions - Superb little book.  You'll read it in a couple of hours and be left with the feeling of TIME WELL SPENT, I'm telling you now.
Tim Lucas, Throat Sprockets - Not all explorations of erotic vampirism are whingy teenage slopfests, you know.  This certainly isn't.
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows - "The Japanese toilet is perfection"
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
David Toop, Ocean of Sound
James Palumbo, Tomas
Anthony Storr, Solitude
Jacky Bowring, A Field Guide to Melancholy
James Lovelock, A Rough Ride to the Future
Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature - Silent slippered servants, jewel-encrusted tortoises.  Dandy misanthropy.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations - Roman emperor has a go at philosophy, with some success.  He killed a lot of Christians but, you know, he felt really bad about it.
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf and Demain
Terence Turner, The DMT Chronicles: Parmenides, Plato and the Psychedelic - An appallingly written but still fascinating book about the link between ancient Greek thought and psychedelic hallucinations.
Douglas Coupland, J-Pod  and Life After God
Gary Lachman, Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius
Robert Rodriguez, Revolver: How the Beatles Reimagined Rock 'n' Roll
Philip Norman, Shout! The True Story of the Beatles
Mark Simpson, Saint Morrissey
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Vladimir Nabokov, Despair
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace - The third best book I have ever read, I think.
John Fowles, The Collector
P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous
Ernest Hemmingway, The Old Man and the Sea - Dolphin.  Big dolphin.
Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers
Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life
Christopher Knight & Alan Butler, Who Built the Moon? - Argues that the moon is an artificial satellite built by humans from the future, and then sent back in time in order that we would evolve to the point where we would be able to build the moon, in order to send it back in time to show ourselves how to build it.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space - My favourite book.
Anon, The Cloud of Unknowing
Steven Poole, Unspeak
Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing
Joel Bakan, The Corporation - If corporations are people, then corporations are psychopaths.
Martin Page, How I Became Stupid
John Wain, The Smaller Sky - Man decides to live in a train station.  Society collapses.
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Erlend Loe, Naïve. Super
Nick Bostrum, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? [pdf]
Jonathan Black, The Secret History of the World and The Sacred History