Start with Paideia. It's much too hard, too boring and too long. (So is life, though you can't know that yet). Full of old people, uncool, rotten, wise. I sense your urge to stop here and give up, but don't.

Thus Spake Zarathustra will make you feel insanely strong and mad as a hatter and, yes, it might teach you to despise the losers. But it will also serve as an endless supply of courage (hollow at times but beggars can't be choosers), and this you will (believe me on that one) quickly come to need, and badly, and not just for fun, not for that.

Auto-da-fé comes next. Long, unfriendly, sad. A mirror with an idiot and a madman here, a zombie with a soul to spare among the living dead. If I know you as well as I think I do, you'll laugh.

The Fountainhead will teach you about perfection, integrity, ideals to treasure, courage to be properly alone, contempt for the sheep, respect for reality, all that with a splinter of evil thrown in for good measure.

Then The Function of the Orgasm and The Selfish Gene. Much too much mad genius and gleeful mania here. But still you'll need this lovelessly dark stuff, oh yes, I'm so sorry, but you will: to know what's going on when you grope or thrust, slash, singe yourself (or others) or fumble or cry, when you debase yourself (yet again) or suffer or just die, to see through stuff that at first seems silly, then confusing, then profound, then silly again, through biology, through love, through lust, through this and that. This is your survivor's guide for the lonely path. And never stop thinking for yourself. (Have I mentioned that?)

Now, back for a little madness and a lot of rage. (If you think you know rage, you ain't seen nothing yet). He's a genius of fury, of precision and of truth. Just sit back, brace yourself, clench your fists, read aloud. He hates you (yes, YOU) with an unyielding passion few have known, fewer still survived. Wittgenstein's Nephew, Old Masters, Woodcutters. And then every other single thing. (Provided you haven't given up on German, which you haven't. Right?)

We're halfway there. A word of advice: read dictionaries (they're boring only if you are). Anyway. Everyone's still alive, no victims yet, the corpse still twitches, smiles and jokes, is bold. You might be tempted to surrender, just snatch the consolation prize and turn back, try to reintegrate yourself into their sad little world. But you won't. Now read on.

Imagination can't be bought or taught, just like an orgasm can't be synthesised or faked (but orgasm can be... OK, I guess I see your point). Now watch the masters have at it no holds barred: Ficciones for the scope, the godlike awe and the soul, The Stars My Destination for the darkness and the flair.

The idiot in fuck-me boots and with jet-black hair who so enticingly struggled with NP movement in your syntax class once told you (confided in you, in fact) that real artists didn't have analytic minds. So now, having finished Gödel, Escher, Bach and having spat the idiocy back in her pretty face, don't let the angry sweat that comes from grappling with this hard, poetic stuff cool off just yet. Glide in again and again, for that precious glimpse of madness, for the infinity, for insane shreds of truth. And only forward (you may now close your eyes), all will click into place, as it always does.

If the towering shadows of the heavyweights (we're almost there, hold on) strike fear in your heart, then you make me proud for being wise enough to cower before great art. The Man Without Qualities, The Recognitions, Sexual Personae, The Tunnel (then just out). All long, demanding, hard. The scary yet strangely delightful 'NO COMPROMISE' written — no, not written, seared — on each and every page should be, by now, also etched on your skin, on your heart, in epic prison-like (and adequately painful) tatoo strokes. It isn't easy, nor is it to be. Yes, it is a test. Don't take it lightly, if you fail, you'll die. But you won't, I know you much too well for that, I know where you have been. See? Also, what's with the bloody, satisfied grin?

The Aesthetics of Resistance: for the grand finale we're back at where we started, with the Germans, with the Greeks. Thus we have come full circle: courage, pain, then death. And somehow, having so valiantly ploughed through so many worlds, so many heads, you have this funny feeling, let's call it a hunch, and suspect those three don't happen to go hand in hand throughout the pages and the years just for kicks. The plot thickens. Well, you have never been the one to be fooled (easily, anyway). So, maybe just a coincidence then? But who am I to say.