The 50 best cult books

The Telegraph's critics came up with a list of the fifty best cult books--"A cult book may be hard to define but one thing is for sure: you know a cult book when you see one"--including:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Burnt-out hippy takes son on bike trip. Remembers previous self: lecturer who had nervous breakdown contemplating Eastern and Western philosophy. Very bad course in Ordinary General Philosophy follows. If he’d done Greek at school and knew what "arête" meant, we could have been spared most of the 1970s.

Read about another entry on the list.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance appears on Michael Palin's six best books list, John Mullan's list of ten of the best motorbikes in literature, and Sebastian Beaumont's top ten list of books about psychological journeys.

--Marshal Zeringue