Daniel (@dungeondive) reaches Part Five with a comics shelf and three deep author sections. The comics run from a signed Sergio Aragonés Groo and Chester Brown’s harrowing autobiographical The Playboy to the under-appreciated 80s manga Grey and Tekkonkinkreet. Then Olaf Stapledon, an early SF philosopher he reveres: Last and First Men, Star Maker, and above all Sirius — the story of a dog granted human intelligence, “the only book I’ve read with the dubious honour of making me cry in public.” He detours through the Illuminatus! Trilogy (a reminder that all that secret-society lore was cheerfully invented), then champions Manly Wade Wellman, the man with the greatest name of all time, and his Appalachian occult hero Silver John — “Lovecraft written in a Mark Twain pastoral style.” Finally Rudy Rucker, the mathematician-novelist and sole practitioner of “transrealism,” whose White Light left a lasting mark. A characteristically generous tour of the gloriously underread.
Stapledon’s Sirius made Daniel cry on a public bus. Which book broke through your defences somewhere you couldn’t hide it?