Top Five Favorite Books

1. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2. High Fidelity by Nick Hornby

3. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

5. Night by Elie Weisel

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"Like all dreamers, Steven mistook disenchantment for truth."

5. Good Omens -- Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
4. The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
3. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
2. The Godfather -- Mario Puzo
1. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- Hunter S Thompson

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Possibly...

Ulysses, James Joyce

The Joke, Milan Kundera

L'Assommoir, Émile Zola

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The Lost Honour Of Katharina Blum, Heinrich Boll

If I were allowed collected works of poetry I'd include -

The Berlin Wall Café, Paul Durcan

Collected Poems, William Butler Yeats

Poetry In English, Edt: ML Rosenthal - a 1,000 page adventure in verse from Beowulf to Heaney

The Waste Land & Other Poems, TS Elliot

Selected Poems 1908-69, Ezra Pound

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"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan

The Bourne Idenity - Robert Ludlum
It - Steven King
Inkheart - Cornelia Funke
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Stardust - Neil Gaiman

I refuse to directly answer this.

My Top 5 Favorite Books from my Childhood

1. Ballet Shoes Noel Stretfield
2. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S Lewis
3. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
4. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
5. The Borrowers by Mary Norton

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I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
T.S Eliot, "Preludes"

Secret Window, Secret Garden (read it)
Running man
Misery
Im not really into books, I like movies more

In no real order:

The Dragon Lance series Weis & Hickman

The continuing Drow series ~ R.A. Salvatore

Johnathan Livingston Seagull ~ Ricard Bach

The Sword of Truth series ~ Terry Goodkind

The Outsiders ~ Hinton....(The movie was great too)

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

Fiction:

1. Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon

2. V. Thomas Pynchon

3. Snowcrash Neal Stephenson

4. American Fuji Sara Becker

5. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner

Non-Fiction:

1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche

2. Being and Time Martin Heidegger

3. The Lightning and the Sun Savitri Devi

4. Men Among the Ruins Julius Evola

5. Meditations Marcus Aurelius

Poetry:

1. Iliad Homer (prefer Fagles translation)

2. The Poetic Edda

3. Bhagavad Gita

4. The Complete Poems of William Blake

5. Rig Veda

This is impossible to come up with. There are so many books on my to-read list that I hardly ever get through a book more than once - so on the one hand, there aren't many books I know all that well... and on the other, even those I do know comprise a tiny sliver of what I haven't read. It's hard enough to come up with lists of films and comics, and those are relatively young media, I don't think I could ever come up with a definitive top five books list, nor would I try.

At the moment I'm thinking of -

Watt
Lolita
The Box Man
Moby-Dick
Temple of the Golden Pavillion

Non fiction: slightly easier question, since I can just go on how useful it is to me.

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth and Reality - Eric Hobsbawm
Fortress Conservation - Dan Brockington
Myth and Reality in the Rainforest - John Oates
At the Hands of Man - Raymond Bonner (for his history of the conservation movement)
The Arrogance of Humanism - David Ehrenfeld (for his critical discussion on the various arguments put forth by conservationists).

One author I think every existentialist should read is Albert Camus. Make sure to read his Afterword in all his books. But not until you read the book (obviously). Just DO NOT skip it!!! He wrote fiction, non-fiction, short stories, and plays but I have only read some of his fiction so far.

Novels (fiction):

The Stranger or The Outsider (same thing)
The Plague
The Fall
A Happy Death
The First Man

Catch-22 is hard to read :-(

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We're soldiers. Soldiers don't go to hell. It's war. Soldiers, they kill other soldiers. We're in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes. And if you're gonna accept those stakes... You gotta do certain things. It's business, we're soldiers. We follow codes... Orders.

In no order...

Star Wars: Heir to the Empire - Timothy Zahn
Star Wars: Dark Force Rising - Timothy Zahn
Going Solo - Roald Dahl
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

That's it. It's not that I'm not interested in books, I just can't bring myself to commit to reading one, only to have to stop reading it when I don't have any free time to do it.

Plus there are few books in the house that look appealing to me.

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"When I was younger, I always wanted to be somebody. Now that I'm older, I realise I should've been more specific."

Hells Angels - Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
The Terminal Man - Michael Crichton
Moby Dick - Herman Melville

And, if we're counting graphic novels...

Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Spiegelman

Catcher In The Rye - JD Salinger
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
Seabiscuit - Laura Hillenbrand
Posession - AS Byatt

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Review: Cabin in the Woods 8/10

Neil Gaiman - American Gods
JK Rowling - HP and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat & Queen of the Damned
Neil Gaiman - Neverwhere
Neil Gaiman - Stardust

Why do you say that?

catcher in the rye - j.d.salinger
the wasp factory - iain banks
love in the time of cholera - g.g.marquez
the shipping news - annie proulx
sputnik sweetheart - haruki murakami

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http://www.last.fm/user/diezelpower/

Another Pynchon and Stephenson fan, although I prefered Cyptonomicon to Snow Crash. Have you read the Baroque cycle novels too? I admire Stephenson's knowledge and refusal to cut down on detail for brevity. A good antidote to most contemporary fiction.

And the Bhagvad Gita explains the Purandara name, at least.

Anyway, it's hard for me to choose favourites. I'll just list the ones I find myself re-reading the most in no particular order.

Fiction:

#1 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

#2 The Castle - Franz Kafka

#3 The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

#4 Flowers for Alganon - Daniel Keyes

#5 If on a winter's night a traveller - Italo Calvino

Non-Fiction:

#1 A Treatise of Human Nature - David Hume.

#2 Globalization and Its Discontents - Joseph Stiglitz

#3 The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama

#4 The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell - Aldous Huxley

#5 The Lexus and the Olive Tree - Thomas Friedman

Poetry:

#1 Hidden Words - Spike Milligan

#2 Songs of Innocence and Experience - William Blake

#3 Paradise Lost - John Milton

#4 The Complete Poems of Andrew Marvell

#5 The Complete Poems of T.S. Elliot

I like Cryptonomicon well enough, though it for the most part lacks the consistent playfulness and literary sizzle of his best works (Snowcrash and The Diamond Age). Crypotnomicon represented the first time that overly elaborat plotting really caused one of his novels to drag in parts, and it really downplayed the satirical edge that is his best attribute as a writer (though some of the scenes are still stupefyingly hilarious, most notably excursus on postmodern academic pomposity re: beards and the 'information superhighway.'

That's where I got off the train. I've always loved his structural echoing of some of his master imagery (codes and networking), but by the time the Baroque Cycle had rolled around, it had gone from technique to conceit, and the whole project just collapsed into 'meanwhile, back at the ranch' syndrome. It's not his erudition or attention to detail that get in the way, but rather his growing penchant for excessive plotting and extraneous characters.

#1: Angels and Demons by Dan Brown
#2: Deception Point by Dan Brown
#3: Timeline by Michael Crichton
#4: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
#5: Harry Potter and The Half-blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

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"An Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"
-Ben Kingsley, GHANDI

"Snozberries taste like snozberries"