  (In which JP takes a halting step towards defining his terms. ) Challenging Texts. OK, this is a rather vague category - Winnie The Pooh was a supremely challenging text when I was 3, after all. I was basically thinking of the notion of books that pose a challenge to the reader, in the sense of textual quirk, or layers of meaning, or narrative experimentation, and the like. I'm putting this list together in fits and starts - of which this is the first - as a first step towards figuring out what I mean by challenging texts.
Step 1: Cataloguing. William Burroughs has to come first. I've read Junky (hard-boiled reporting, but with all the themes he later expanded upon), Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded and My Education: A Book of Dreams. I recently got hold of The Western Lands. I love the frenzied cut-up technique of Naked Lunch and the books around it, the sudden bursts of relatively lucid but utterly surreal narrative that occasionally surface out of the word stew. I treat 'My Education' as a sort of I Ching, to be dipped into at random. I can't comment on Western Lands yet.
Although the books are weird reading, I feel that I've gained a lot to think about for my efforts - a certain perspective on addiction as a pattern for the various ways in which power is exerted, a sense of multiple realities, and of the power of the word, of human imagination, to transform. Then there's Italo Calvino. I picked up Invisible Cities when I was a schoolboy, because I'd enjoyed reading of Marco Polo's travels. Boy, was that a head-trip. It infected me with a certain way of looking at cities that has never left me. I believe the every city is the aggregate of the millions of individual cities that each citizen inhabits. You don't just live in a city - you actively create your own specific city within the urban sprawl. This was followed by Cosmicomics - these would be classic sf short stories in a parallel world - and The Castle of Crossed Destinies.
Lewis Caroll, for sure. Wonderland was fun and freaky - ooh, mushrooms and bongs! But Through the Looking Glass really blew me away, and nearly lured me into learning to play chess. OK, coffee time, more later. If you have any light to shed, please do click on that little comment link below and give me the benefit of your wisdom. And I say that with no sarcasm. Promise. 
