10 Books to Blow Your Mind

From Hunter to Ayn, the Telegraph lists books you can 'wear like a leather jacket'

(NEWSER) - It’s hard to define the "cult" book, but the Telegraph compiled 50 of the top contenders that “rewire your head.”

• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
• Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946)
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)

Contemporary authors admit to the classics they've never tried—or tried and failed—to read

(NEWSER) - Just because they're accomplished writers doesn't mean they've made it through Ulysses. Slate asks contemporary authors to confess to the must-read classics they've never read:

1. Amy Bloom, Moby Dick
2. Stephen Carter, Harry Potter
3. Jennifer Egan, Buddenbrooks

Forbes picks the best based on selection and buyer experience.

(NEWSER) - Forbes picks the best based on selection and buyer experience.

1. abebooks.com
2. amazon.com
3. audible.com
4. bn.com
5. powells.com

This list might be enough to make your head hurt

(NEWSER) - Great books can bring great joy—and, in a few cases, great big headaches. Listverse compiles the 10 toughest reads in literature:

• Finnegans Wake, James Joyce: If you thought Joyce would ride his way onto this list compliments of Ulysses, think again. Written partially in a made-up language of mindbendingly convoluted puns, this novel is often considered unreadable.

Remembering the writer, not the myth

(NEWSER) - The myth of JD Salinger the withdrawn man doesn't match Salinger the writer, Adam Gopnik writes. On the page, Salinger was charming, expansive, and relentlessly engaged with the world. "No American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart," Gopnik writes in the New Yorker . "A self-enclosed writer doesn’t listen, and Salinger was a peerless listener: page after page of pure talk flowed out of him, moving and true and, above all, funny." More»