There are two kinds of people in this world: those who derive a certain kind of nourishment from works of imagination, and the other ones.  If you're of the first group, list five books -- and the term is loose enough to include short stories or graphic novels or anything else for which you can make a winning case -- that give you a sort of guidance or sense of meaning or other ineffable thing that makes an impact on some core part of you.  You don't need to say why, though you're welcome to.

Reply more than once if you like, but keep it to five books per entry -- I hate lists of forty things, regardless of how interesting they are individually.

- - - - - - -

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long, Dark Teatime of the Soul [See? I'm cheating already...] - Douglas Adams

Neuromancer - William Gibson

The Club Dumas - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Traitor's Purse - Margery Allingham 

Good thread concept, dude!

Number one is easy: Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. A book I desperately need to replace on my shelf.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

Normally, I might throw in The Trail by Franz Kafka, not this time, but I will refer you to another of his works, the short story A Hunger Artist, great stuff.

Call me predicatable, but I have to list A Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Talk about altering one's perception...Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

"Every day holds a new beginning and every hour holds the promise of an Invitation to Love." 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

And that's about it for now. I'm totally drawing a blank, which tells me it's too damn early for me to participate in this thread. :)

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne

Oranges are not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Sons and Lovers by DH Lawrence

My theory by A. Elk, brackets, Miss, brackets. This theory goes as follows and begins now. All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is my theory, it is mine, and it belongs to me, and I own it, and what it is, too.

Ange's Odyssey

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis

To Kill a Mockigbird - Harper Lee

Threepenny Opera - Bertolt Brecht

The Niebelungenlied - Anonymous

My prized possession is my collection of Bertolt Brecht poems.  It is proudly displayed on my bookshelf and you aren't allowed to touch it, at all, without washing your hands first and me watching you.

Okay, you're predicatable. >:) 

I quote this because the article I read that inspired the idea for the thread was about how so much of the fiction audience is female, and why men don't stray more from non-fiction. Catcher in the Rye is referenced as one of the few books that gets mentioned as being influential or important among men -- and this is large part from being forced to read it in school, which for a lot of males is apparently the last time they read fiction at all.  Its absence from my list can probably be directly attributed to my Bouncing Around Between Schools, the hole that also swallowed Shakespeare.

I'm glad you like the thread.

- - - - -

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

Illuminatus! - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham

Generation X - Douglas Coupland

The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allen Poe

Great idea for a thread, Jamie.  I'd like to give it some more thought before I post, if I may.

~ 'I will give you my finest hour, the one I spent watching you shower' ~

In this category, I don't choose them, they choose me...

Ohhh this is great!

 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller.  Changed the way that I feel about fragmented narrative sructures.

 Soul Mountain - Gao Xingjiang.  Spare, bleak language that somehow manages to paint pictures in your mind that never really go away.

 Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco.  For those that wished the Da Vinci code had made them actually think.

 Ulysses - James Joyce.  I tackled this one on a recommendation from someone (I forget who) here at the gazette and it took me a couple of tries but I think that I will be able to find new delights every time I open this one.

 Still looking for a fifth to join my life.  The answer is always to read as widely as possible!

I am likely to miss the main event

If I stop to cry or complain again.

So I'll just keep a deliberate pace,

Let the damn breeze dry my face.

Great thread!

Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

Book of Top 10 Lists - David Letterman

That's it for now..., more may come to me after coffee.

"We cannot allow a mine shaft gap"

Crime & Punishment - some Russian guy

Island - Aldous Huxley

The Iliad - some Greek guy 

Set This House On Fire - William Styron

Camp of the Saints - some French guy 

Susan 

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

Ubik - Philip K Dick
VALIS - PKD
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonegut
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Can I steal this as one of mine? Great choice!

I'll add four more:

The Three Musketeers greatest adventure story ever, IMO. I've read it a bazillion times over since the age of 12, I just love Dumas' style of writing, he can describe in one paragraph what it would take other authors a whole chapter to do.

Paradise Lost again its the style of writing I love. The classic tale of good versus evil. Before I could even understand the language Milton used I used to just be fascinated by the illustrations. Its not an easy read perhaps.

A Clockwork Orange as a teenager I was so into this book. It inspired me in many ways to rebel. Its still radical even today and I would argue even better than Kubrick's adaptation. Actually, I remember being so disappointed when I finally managed to see an interview on television with Anthony Burgess. He camed across as arrogant, self-obsessed and cantakerous, which kind of shattered my connection with the him. Still a great book nevertheless.

The Lord of the Rings  I know, there's been an overdose on LoTR with the Peter Jackson films and all the marketing associated with it but the book is still one of my favourites. I think I've read it more than ten times over. Okay it is overly long in places, but its also touching and sensitive, epic and intricate. I hope in the future that kids don't just watch the films, they'd be missing out IMO.

Now, I'm thinking about the next five... 

x-ray
if your back's against the wall, turn around and write on it...

That god damn trailer's more popular than Uncle's Day in a whorehouse!

BOB'S NOTE:

To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either."

Because he was a kind man as well as a funny one, Benny was beloved. I find it hard to believe that I am equally beloved and especially that I deserve such love.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, know that my love is with you.

You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.

Blessings.

I didn't know about it until this minute, and now I'm checking to see how to do it.  Thank you for that.  Uncle Bob has been tremendously important to me for over fifteen years...

The Assault on Tony's- John O'Brien

Faces in the Water- Janet Frame

The Red Virgin- Fernando Arrabal

Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov

Les Liaisons Dangereuses- Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (a great fantasy world)

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon (written in a great concise style)

short stories - Jorge Luis Borges (unique and impossible to describe)

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept - Elizabeth Smart (searing, passionate emotion)

Duino Elegies - Rilke (very moving and evocative)

• The Outsider/The Fall by Albert Camus
• The Brothers Karamazov/The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley
• In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje
• 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Sorry broke the rules and squeezed a couple extra in there.

Beauty is momentary in the mind -
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
the cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrement of praise.

('Peter Quince at the Clavier' by Wallace Stevens)

I thought I had already given my fab five.  Quelle shocker!  Well, here goes.  I've chosen 5 books I can, and have, read again and again, and derive some sort of comfort from. 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers

Affinity and Fingersmith, Sarah Waters (two for the price of one )

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood

The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber

The Eye of the Beholder, Marc Behm

~ 'I will give you my finest hour, the one I spent watching you shower' ~

Why Great Gatsby I wonder, Jamie? Cause I like the book and all but still I can't see how it would help me with my life so I'd like to hear about someone else's.

Oh how I share your hatred :-)

I'd rather have a little more time for writing something with descriptions, reasons, so for the time being just one obvious choice - Lord of the Rings , nevermind the overdose it is without a shadow of doubt my number one fiction piece.
And how can it help me live my life?
By showing that there is still something good in the world, as Sam says in the film (does he say that in the book, too? hmm....). Always something good, and the evil ones they cannot conquer forever; and besides the sheer beauty of that book (both story and language) makes me feel life is really something wonderful.
 

Bobi 1 Kenobi

B. Beware
O. Of
B. BOB 

You know those times when, in seemingly one leap, you understand things in a larger way? Like, the first film I ever watched in which I could suddenly see some of the art of the thing, subtexts and symbols and metaphors and stuff, was Rear Window, and that was an opening into a new world. Gatsby was my first book of that, and probably for that reason it carved a kind of emotional template in me for how I would approach books from then on, and therefore life as well.

All that to say "sentimental favorite, with benefits".

I think I know what you mean...

[Ep.7 Cooper voice] Thanks for clearing up [/Ep.7 Cooper voice]

Bobi 1 Kenobi

B. Beware
O. Of
B. BOB