 | Gravity's Rainbow (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) by Thomas Pynchon
Buy new: $12.92 / Used from: $3.39 The pinnacle post modern achievement in literature: "Everything is connected"
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 | Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $7.00 Brutal, devastating, poetic. The "Judge" will stay with you always.
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 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Penguin Classics) by James Joyce
Buy new: $7.92 / Used from: $1.22 Fly above the confines of culture, religion, family. A possible solution to Foucault's power matrices
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 | Mao II: A Novel by Don DeLillo
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.99 "The future belongs to crowds." Or does it? You decide.
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 | Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference by Mark Edmundson
Buy used from: $0.01 In my world, every teacher would be like Frank Lears. Read this book.
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 | One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse
Buy new: $14.28 / Used from: $2.19 Amazingly prescient take on modern society. Required reading.
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 | Gilles Deleuze (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by C. Colebrook
Buy new: $17.90 / Used from: $12.00 Deleuze is the most original thinker since Wittgenstein. But he's difficult in the primary texts. Read this first.
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 | Mason & Dixon: A Novel by Thomas Pynchon
Buy new: $11.56 / Used from: $3.97 Get through this and you're a black belt intellectual. Pynchon's normal toughness with Elizibethian languauge to boot. But Great.
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 | Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche
Buy new: $12.24 / Used from: $8.03 We must learn to push that which is falling. Read as much Nietzsche as you can.
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 | The Freud Reader by Sigmund Freud
Buy new: $15.61 / Used from: $8.69 His psychoanalytic theories may be out of favor, but his takes on humanity/civilization still seem very true to me.
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 | Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M. Diamond
Buy new: $12.21 / Used from: $1.19 The explanatory power of this book cannot be overstated. Why wasn't I taught like this?
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 | The Crucible (Penguin Classics) by Arthur Miller
Buy new: $9.36 / Used from: $0.94 This book will always be relevent, just as it is today.
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 | The Social Contract (Penguin Classics) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Buy new: $9.00 / Used from: $0.75 Cities are the abyss of the human species.
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 | Postmodern Theory by Steven Best
Buy new: $17.12 / Used from: $3.75 The best intro to PoMo I've read. Great on Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Lyotard.
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 | The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium by Steven Best
Buy new: $17.56 / Used from: $1.98 The Second Best take on PoMo I've read. Great review of Gravity's Rainbow. Excellent synthesis across fields.
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 | Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky by Noam Chomsky
Buy new: $14.93 / Used from: $3.95 Power may be diffuse, but Noam explains the parts that are not!
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 | Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell
Buy new: $10.80 / Used from: $1.90 If you were unsure beforehand, this will tilt you one way.
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 | American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Buy used from: $2.21 Amazingly powerful and well written book from a guy whose done many.
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 | Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Buy new: $7.99 / Used from: $0.01 Don't let the sci-fi pyrotechnics fool you. This is a serious, highly moral book.
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 | Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
Buy new: $11.55 / Used from: $4.00 As great as Orwell is, I believe this guy is proving to be more right.
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 | A Collection of Essays by George Orwell
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.50 Besides the great books, everyone should have Orwell's essays on hand. Re-read these often.
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 | Walden and Other Writings (Modern Library Classics) by Henry David Thoreau
Buy new: $9.56 / Used from: $2.32 "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Civil Disobedience is the greatest essay ever written.
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 | On the Road (Penguin Classics) by Jack Kerouac
Buy new: $10.40 / Used from: $4.99 A truer 20th Century America. I like those that burn, burn burn as well
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 | Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
Buy new: $5.99 / Used from: $0.01 Ultimate knowledge lies within, not without.
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