14 must-read books for the college rebel
Hey you! Yeah you, the sullen one sitting in the back of the class. If you want to be the brooding loner on campus, you have to do your homework. That condescending lecture you’re dying to give the mental midgets in your dorm isn’t going to magically appear on its own. Here are 14 books that will give college rebels the intellectual firepower they need to become the judgmental pricks we all know and love.
Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book
How do you rebel if you don’t know how? You begin by taking social/political activist Abbie Hoffman’s advice, starting with the title of his infamous 1971 tome Steal This Book. Much of the book’s detailed guides to miscreant acts like starting a pirate radio station, stealing food and clothes, and obtaining a free buffalo from the U.S. Department Of The Interior have long since become obsolete, but it’s still a good starting place for today’s forward-thinking rabble-rouser. A word of warning, though: If you’re asking yourself, “What the hell would I do with my own buffalo?” then you’re probably not a rebel.
Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader
Rebels are all about sticking it to the man, and there’s nothing the man hates more than a 80-year-old America-bashing anarchist. With his trenchant and often devastating criticism of U.S. foreign policy, media, and capitalism, Noam Chomsky is the go-to source for the college student who wants to be known as the campus bad-ass libertarian socialist with anarcho-syndicalist sympathies. The Chomsky Reader is as good a place to start as any, even though buying the book will contribute to a sick, inherently unfair economic system that subjugates the poor and benefits the rich and powerful.
Howard Zinn, A People’s History Of The United States
Nothing screams, “Hey, look at me, I’m a budding young leftist!” like toting around a copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. Published in 1980, the book introduces the radical, mind-blowing idea that, you know, history is written by the winners—and that there’s a dark, repressive, warmongering underbelly to the American dream. Because we didn’t know that already.
William Powell, The Anarchist Cookbook
William Powell wrote The Anarchist Cookbook in the late ’60s, when the idea of blowing shit up on American soil didn’t have the connotation it does post-9/11. The book’s recipes for whipping up explosives and other such sedition may seem laughably outdated today, but the word “anarchist” is still enough to raise an eyebrow—even if the born-again Powell has long since disowned the book, saying it was a “product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam… I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Valuing personal excellence over herd mentality, living one’s life as though it were a work of art—grand statements like that make excellent excuses for skipping class, screwing over your roommates, and not calling a girl the next the day. Hey, it’s just part and parcel of humanity’s inherent “will to power,” which is our way of imposing order on, as Nietzsche says in Human, All Too Human, “coming to grips with chaos and emptiness.” For those who need a personal philosophy without having to do the homework, Nietzsche offers a slash-and-burn template for chucking the whole damn thing.
Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works
Need a literary companion to the copy of The Doors Greatest Hits you just picked up? Fear not, poetic outsider: Arthur Rimbaud’s Complete Works is your new blueprint. Jim Morrison was famously a big fan of the doomed, moody, 19th-century French writer, whose most famous work, A Season In Hell was written under the influence of massive doses of opium and absinthe. Hopefully, that dime bag and twelve-pack of Pabst in your dorm room will have the same effect.
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
In his most famous work, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson painted “the search for the American Dream” as a non-stop bender supplied by marijuana, cocaine, psychedelics, liquor, and “a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers”—in short, exactly the kind of rampant self-abuse that most college kids take on as a secondary night course. Hardly anyone who’s read Thompson’s work does so without picturing themselves in the Good Doctor’s place, making pithy, poetic observations on the human condition and eloquently pointing out the hypocrisy of squares, all while blasted out of their skulls. Of course, the reality of Thompson’s grueling work ethic and painstakingly honed gift for prose usually runs a distant second to merely replicating his self-indulgence, which is why there haven’t been too many noteworthy works from his besotted disciples. Most abandon those pretenses after discovering that writing when they’re fucked up isn’t as easy as it looks.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Subtitled—or at least it should be—The Emo Girl’s Bible, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is the author’s lone novel, an apocalyptically depressing chronicle of mental illness that culminated in Plath’s own suicide in 1963, a month after the book was published. Of course, had Plath somehow been magically granted access to today’s designer bipolar drugs, she probably would have lived to be the next Erma Bombeck.
Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible
Satanism was a much scarier word in the ’70s, right after Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Bible came out in 1969 and America was awash in urban legends about ritualistic kidnapping and human sacrifice. LaVey—the founder and head of The Church Of Satan until his death in 1997—embedded a much more sinister mandate in his Bible, though: His strident advocacy of selfishness, hierarchy, and the superiority of the strong over the weak read more like a playbook for today’s neocon movement. Spooky.
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Drunkenness isn’t only tolerated in college culture, it’s encouraged and even glamorized beyond all reason. The same could be said of the work of poet and author Charles Bukowski, the so-called “poet laureate of Skid Row” who made filthy, hopeless alcoholism and indiscriminate skirt-chasing somehow seem like admirable qualities. Bukowski’s autobiographical 1975 novel Factotum details the author’s attempt to forge a writing career while working a series of menial jobs and slowly drinking and fucking himself to death. Sounds awesome, huh? (Bonus for Minnesotans: The recent movie version was filmed in the Twin Cities.)
Herman Hesse, Siddhartha
A tale of restless contemplation and great indulgence, Siddhartha is a great way to invest the wanderings of youth with meaning. It at least hits a sympathetic note with those prone to sitting on riverbanks and holding drawn-out intellectual debates. Helpfully, Hesse’s book is a short one, his prose chiseling down the tale of an Eastern spiritual searcher with searing sparseness. That also means some paperback editions fit nicely in the pocket, keeping young protégés in easy reach of handy quotes from “Let me warn you, you who are thirsty for knowledge, against the thicket of opinions and the conflict of words” to “Your mouth is like a freshly cut fig.”
Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf
Marked “For madmen only,” Hesse’s semi-autobiographical tale attacks its protagonist with more of the modern Western world. Lonely, suicidal, and somewhat bitterly removed from the civilization around him, Harry Haller embodies a world-weariness that so many young men long to conflate with their own. He stumbles upon many possible routes to happiness and rebirth, yet there are no easy answers. Instead, Steppenwolf entices miserable youth with an intoxicating swirl of eastern philosophy and hedonistic abandon.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
When a budding scholar gets buried under mounds of godawful Spenser and Milton, it’s nice to be reminded that prestigious literature can embrace kaleidoscopic storylines, outrageously bizarre humor, swear words, and crude line drawings of boobs. As demeaning as it may seem, Vonnegut’s books are an ideal read for those with short attention spans, many of whom must be grateful that Slaughterhouse-Five laid so much meaning on little nuggets like “So it goes.” Vonnegut smears a devastating war story, satire, and sci-fi ramble into the tale of Billy Pilgrim, who becomes “unstuck in time” to experience the firebombing of Dresden and life in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, among other things.
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Tie off that vein, shower humanity with your wicked contempt, let all those thoughts flow out in unruly tangles, and a sordid revolution’s on. Can you keep track? Who the fuck cares? In fact, it’s arguable that nobody’s supposed to keep track of this novel, a garishly vivid satire spilling all over itself and sliced into bits that seem assembled in near-random order. Its ruthless vision of addiction and sex makes for constant disorientation, even when it’s blazingly funny. Still, it’s probably a bit easier to follow than your average Allen Ginsberg poem, and recent editions include Burrough’s handy guide “Letter From A Master Addict To Dangerous Drugs.”
