Literary works that every aspie should read...

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Please offer suggestions..

Anything by Octavia Butler. She writes rich, deep, insightful speculative fiction with themes of race/discrimination/genetics/analysis of society and her protagonists are always set apart somehow, iconoclastic

(e.g. in one of her books, Survivor, the hero is a feral human, adopted in early adolescence by missionaries who were always trying to force their ways on her)

Here's a good one, if you like fiction involving Aspie-like characters -

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz


link:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9781594489587-0

I guess this depends on age and reading level doesn't it?

Absolutely must read:

the wasp factory
Flowers for Algernon
Watership down
Animal farm
the Hobbit
and the OZ books

http://www.xkcd.com/245/

Anything by Philip K. Dick or Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann.

I love Philip K. Dick. I personally love the Valis series, it fits in with my own personal mythology soooo well, but I would never recommend anyone read Valis as their first book by Dick.

The Stranger, by Camus. It's basically about an Aspie.

I would also suggest any book by Chuck Palahniuk.

i would recommend many of the works of j.g. ballard. in particular, the unlimited dream company, high rise, concrete island, and basically any of his collections of short stories. i really feel he is one of the greatest writers of our times.

here is what the scriptorium page has to say about him... http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/ballard.html



"Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire."
-- J.G. Ballard


i would also recommend flann o'brien's "the third policeman" and possibly "at-swim-two-birds", one of my favourite books but by all accounts an aquired taste based on the reactions of those i have recommended it to in the past.

I would tell you guys to read The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. It's suitably strange, and we can all identify with the main character, Oskar the dwarf, and his outside-looking-in witnessing of the events around him. Events which involve Nazis, paternal disputes, the circus, insane asylums, and all sorts of weirdo imagery. You'll be hooked.

I read "Never Cry Wolf" by Farley Mowat in junior high school and it really helped me figure out how to interact with average people. He spends a good deal of time observing and learning about the social rules and habits of wolves. I sort of applied that to the social rules and habits of the people around me, and it helped me to interact "correctly" more than I had been.

I also liked the part where he learns the correct technique for marking his territory in a way understood by wolves!

Oh crikey I'm in heaven here...certainly 'The Tin Drum', certainly anything by Camus. Also the essays of George Orwell are very good. I've other titles tho I'm waiting to see who else suggests them first.

James Purdy if you can track him down.
I think that may just be one of those authors everybody should read.