A Dharma List
Explore a curated Dharma list of transformative books, from Kerouac's On the Road and Hesse's Siddhartha to Bukowski and Krakauer, blending fiction, beat culture, and existential journeys.
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Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
Blends elements of psychoanalysis and Asian religions to probe an Indian aristocrat's efforts to renounce sensual and material pleasures and discover spiritual truths.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Chronicles the way of life of the beat generation as Dean Moriarty speeds across America.
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Into the Wild
by Jon Krakauer
In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhikes to Alaska and walks alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four months later, his decomposed body is found by a moose hunter. How Chris McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
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Women
by Charles Bukowski
Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova. With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.
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Aztec
by Gary Jennings
The epic tale of an Aztec survivor of the Spanish conquest and his times as a warrior, scribe, travelling merchant, confidant of Motecuhzoma II, and envoy to the invading Spaniards.
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Stranger in a Strange Land
by Robert A. Heinlein
The complete, uncut version of Robert A. Heinlein’s all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a science fiction classic. Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth’s inhabitants forever...
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Journey to the Centre of the Earth
by Jules Verne
Three men adventure into a secret passage, disclosed by an old parchment, through a volcano to the center of the earth.
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The Rum Diary
by Hunter S. Thompson
The irreverent writer's long lost novel, written before his nonfiction became popular, chronicles a journalist's enthusiastic, drunken foray through 1950s San Juan.
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The Subterraneans
by Jack Kerouac
Written over the course of three days and three nights, The Subterraneans was generated out of the same ecstatic flash of inspiration that produced another one of Kerouac's early classic, On The Road. Centering on the tempestous breakup of Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox--two denizens of the 1950s San Francsico underground--The Subterraneans is a tale of dark alleys and dark rooms, of artists, of visionaries,
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Naked Lunch
by William S. Burroughs
Since its original publication in Paris in 1959, Naked Lunch has become one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the relationship of art and obscenity, it is one of the books that redefined not just literature but American culture. For the Burroughs enthusiast and the neophyte, this volume—that contains final-draft typescripts, numerous unpublished contemporaneous writings by Burroughs, his own later introductions to the book, and his essay on psychoactive drugs—is a valuable and fresh experience of a novel that has lost none of its relevance or satirical bite.
