Reading Material:
Widsith is an Old English poem of 144 lines that appears to date from the 9th century, drawing on earlier oral traditions of Anglo-Saxon tale singing. The poem refers to a group of people called the Wicinga cynn, which may be the earliest mention of the word “Viking” (lines 47, 59, 80).
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William Blake wrote his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), which contains what Anthony Blunt has called a “brilliant analysis” of Chaucer. It is regularly anthologised as a classic of Chaucer criticism.
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William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), Oothoon is in love with Theotormon, who represents the chaste man, filled with a false sense of righteousness. Oothoon desires Theotormon but is suddenly, violently raped by Bromion. After Oothoon is raped neither Bromion nor Theotormon want anything to do with her. Blake has the Daughters of Albion look to the West, to America, because he believed that there was a promise in America that would one day end all forms of discrimination.
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Philip Dru: Administrator: a Story of Tomorrow, 1920-1935 is a futuristic political novel published anonymously in 1912 by Edward Mandell House, His book’s hero leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, and becomes the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms that resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes.
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The Man in the High Castle (1962) is a science fiction alternate history novel by Philip K. Dick. It won a Hugo Award in 1963 and has since been translated into many languages.
The story of The Man in the High Castle, about daily life under totalitarian Fascist imperialism, occurs in 1962, fourteen years after the end of a longer Second World War (1939–1948).
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Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (often abbreviated to Caleb Williams) (1794) by William Godwin is a three-volume novel intended as a popularization of the ideas presented in his 1793 treatise Political Justice Godwin uses Caleb Williams to show how legal and other institutions can and do destroy individuals, even when the people the justice system touches are innocent of any crime. The original manuscript included a preface that was removed for publication, because its content alarmed booksellers of the time.
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Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) is William Godwin’s biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft. He did not shrink from presenting the parts of Wollstonecraft’s life that late eighteenth-century British society would judge either immoral or in bad taste, such as her close friendship with a woman, her love affairs, her illegitimate child, her suicide attempts and her agonizing death.
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The Exegesis is a journal kept by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, documenting and exploring his religious and visionary experiences. Dick’s wealth of knowledge on the subjects of philosophy, religion, and science inform the work throughout.
In late April, 2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced plans to publish further excerpts from the Exegesis in two volumes. The first, approximately 350 pages long, would be released in 2011, and the second (a volume of the same length) in 2012. Editor Jonathan Lethem described the upcoming publications as “absolutely stultifying, brilliant, repetitive, and contradictory. It just might contain the secret of the universe.”
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) (which he refers to as “the most vital of them all”) utilizes an array of science fiction concepts and features several layers of reality and unreality. It is also one of Dick’s first works to explore religious themes. Life is physically daunting and psychologically monotonous for most colonists, so the UN must draft people to go to the colonies. Most entertain themselves using “Perky Pat” dolls and accessories manufactured by Earth-based “P.P. Layouts”. The company also secretly creates “Can-D”, an illegal but widely available hallucinogenic drug allowing the user to “translate” into Perky Pat (if the drug user is a woman) or Pat’s boyfriend, Walt (if the drug user is a man). This recreational use of Can-D allows colonists to experience a few minutes of an idealized life on Earth by participating in a collective hallucination.
Ubik (1969) uses extensive networks of psychics and a suspended state after death in creating a state of eroding reality. Much of the novel flicks between a number of equally plausible realities; the “real” reality, a state of half-life and psychically manipulated realities. In 2005, Time magazine listed it among the “All-TIME 100 Greatest Novels” published since 1923.
A Scanner Darkly (1977) is a bleak mixture of science fiction and police procedural novels; Substance D is instantly addictive, beginning with a pleasant euphoria which is quickly replaced with increasing confusion, hallucinations and eventually total psychosis. In a 1976 interview, Dick cited A Scanner Darkly as his best work, feeling that he “had finally written a true masterpiece, after 25 years of writing”.
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Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson, first published in 1740. It tells the story of a beautiful but poor 15-year old servant-maid named Pamela Andrews whose master, Mr. B, a nobleman, makes unwanted advances towards her. Mr. B is infatuated with her, but his high rank hinders him from proposing marriage. He abducts her and locks her up in one of his estates and attempts to seduce and rape her. She rejects him continually refusing to be his mistress though she begins to realize that she is falling in love with him. Her virtue is eventually rewarded when he shows his sincerity by proposing an equitable marriage to her as his legal wife. In the second part of the novel, Pamela attempts to accommodate herself to upper-class society.
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Leaves of Grass (Deathbed Edition/1892) by Walt Whitman. Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. This book is notable for its delight in and praise of the senses during a time when such candid displays were considered immoral.
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Little, Big by John Crowley is the epic story of the Drinkwater family and their relationship with the mostly obscured world of Faery.The story is dreamlike, quiet, and meandering, spanning a hundred years of the intertwined family trees of the Drinkwaters and their relations—from the turn of the twentieth century to a sparsely-described dystopian future America ruled by a sinister despot.
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Ratner’s Star is a 1976 novel by Don DeLillo. It relates the story of a child prodigy mathematician who arrives at a secret installation to work on the problem of deciphering a mysterious message that appears to come from outer space. The novel is told in two parts; the first is a conventional narrative, the second is less so.
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A Voyage to Arcturus David Lindsay, first published in 1920. It It has been described by critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the “greatest novel of the twentieth century.”
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The Flight to Lucifer is the only novel by the American Harold Bloom (born 1930 in New York). Published during 1979, it was composed as a sequel to the David Lindsay novel A Voyage to Arcturus. Most of its content derives fairly directly from Gnosticism, which Bloom had studied.
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The Golden Notebook is by Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook.
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Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson or An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man by G. I. Gurdjieff. The plot of Beelzebub’s Tales primarily revolves around the ruminations of an extraterrestrial known as “Beelzebub” to his grandson Hassein. It mainly recounts the adventures and travails of Beelzebub amongst the ‘three-brained beings’ (humans) of the planet Earth. Beelzebub covers the entire history of the strange behaviors and customs of these beings.
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Claimed by Francis Stevens (pseduonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett) which H.P. Lovecraft called “One of the strangest and most compelling science fantasy novels you will ever read.”
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Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage (1985) by Paul Ekman
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The Conference of the Birds (1170 AD) by Farid ud-Din Attar
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The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers Lovecraft borrowed Chambers’ method of only vaguely referring to supernatural events, entities, and places, thereby allowing his readers to imagine the horror for themselves. The imaginary play The King in Yellow effectively became another piece of occult literature in the Cthulhu Mythos alongside the Necronomicon and others.
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The Willows and Other Queer Tales by Algernon Blackwood. Lovecraft declares Blackwood’s “The Willows” to be the single best piece of weird fiction ever written.
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Mabinogion, Arthur Machen’s main passions were for writers and writing he felt achieved ecstacy, such as the work the Mabinogion.
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The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen. H.P. Lovecraft: “Mr Machen, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into…above all his memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams.
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In The Books in My Life, Henry Miller chose Blackwood’s The Bright Messenger as “the most extraordinary novel on psychoanalysis, one that dwarfs the subject.”
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The Principles of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell
Jules Vuillemin: “The Principles inaugurated contemporary philosophy. Other works have won and lost the title. Such is not the case with this one. It is serious, and its wealth perseveres. Furthermore, in relation to it, in a deliberate fashion or not, it locates itself again today in the eyes of all those that believe that contemporary science has modified our representation of the universe and through this representation, our relation to ourselves and to others.”
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Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
In 1986 Gao was misdiagnosed with lung cancer, and he began a 10-month trek along the Yangtze, which resulted in his novel Soul Mountain (《灵山》). The part-memoir, part-novel, first published in Taiwan in 1989, mixes literary genres and utilizes shifting narrative voices.
