Best Novels of June 2010






Recently, I've read a catalog book that lists the books that are considered cult-fiction in the history of literature. Interestingly, the four novels you see above made it into the list along with other very well known novels such as On the Road, The Time Traveller's Wife, Twilight (sigh), Carrie, Dracula, Delta of Venus. As you can see, not all of these so called cult-fictions are really serious or high-brow fiction like Hopscotch or Life A User's Manual. How then do we define cult? What makes a book cult? I remember reading somewhere that Umberto Eco defines cult, for books and films, as a story that is incomplete. Blade Runner anyone? Or Kafka's The Trial? Or the dream-maze of Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore? I wouldn't call these works as incomplete, but there is a certain mystery, an unanswered question that we get at the end of our reading that make us come back to them; forcing us to read over and over again. Perhaps that is one way of defining cult.

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