Top five books?

I used to read a lot........but that was before the murder (um, that's a joke) - now I still read but not many novels - I'll read true crime books or short stories or poetry or classic pulp/noir........and I more often just re-read my fave novels. These 5 are the ones that have stuck with me my whole life and that's 213 years so they have stood the test of time.

The last 2 are short story collections and when the cops come they will be thrown into a duffel bag while I go down the fire escape.

1. A Fan's Notes (Exley)
2. The Stranger (Camus)
3. Steps (Kosinski)
4. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Carver)
5. The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe

Collected Shakespeare
Montaigne's Essays
War and Peace
Emerson's Essays

And then one of: Women in Love, The Wings of the Dove, Moby Dick, The Divine Comedy, Wordsworth's The Prelude, Paradise Lost

Browsing through this list, I'm stroking my chin in semi-amusement. Really interesting stuff. Pacinoyes looks like he lives in the world of David Cronenberg. Seriously interesting stuff, dude....I might cop some off you.


3 years later, here is how I have evolved. My list changes by the wind, so here's what feels right at the moment. Always the unconventionalist am I, seriously who's read these?   I'm less obsessed with the reputation of something, but rather with the idiosyncrasies of a book.


The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (this doesn't change.  feels like the one constant here.)
Runaway by Alice Munro (strange narratives sets this apart)
The Consumer by Michael Gira (descriptive to say the least, the environment is so mutated here)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (childhood favorite, far more fantastical than the movie. Just feels like a deep part of me.)
City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert (just read, amazingly told story.   the time passage of New York feels tender, and it's filled with sex, booze, and innocence. The movie won't do it justice I'm afraid. )

I'll update, may as well.

1. Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis) - "I will write in this book what no one who has happiness would dare to write: I will accuse the gods, especially the god who lives on the Grey Mountain. That is, I will tell all that he has done to me from the very beginning, as though I were making my complaint of him before a judge. But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the Mountain will not answer me. Terrors and plagues are not an answer." And with that, Lewis sets up his whole novel: an attack on the gods and their meddling in the affairs of men. Of course, Lewis is on the side of the gods, which makes the book infinitely fascinating: Lewis is debating himself, writing attacks that he must then defend against. No straw man simplicity here.

2. The Westing Game (Ellen Raskin) - This is a book that works on several levels. The first is a mystery, in which the detectives try to solve the clues found in Westing's will. This level is ingenious, featuring the cleverest red herrings and misdirection I have ever encountered. The second level is a comedy, in which sixteen(!) eccentric detectives all try to solve the case in their own ways, clashing with others every step of the way. This level is ASTOUNDINGLY hilarious, and this is certainly the funniest book I've ever read. In the third level, the book is a celebration of the American Dream - and a criticism of it. It is here that the book is elevated from simply being a piece of light entertainment. Raskin is a paradox of a woman: raised the daughter of a union organizer, she would become wealthy as a capitalist playing the stock market, and those two sides of her are in constant battle in her portrait of an America split along class lines and race lines, in her portrait of children under the shadows of their upbringing, in her portrait of a nation built by immigrants that spits on the "new" immigrants that come into it. Raskin wants the American Dream to be real, as she has experienced it first hand: but her beliefs in the philosophies of her parents make her question the price of it. Which is all a longwinded way of saying that this book is way more nuanced and intelligent than you will find in any other book aimed at young children.

3. The Killer Angels (Michael Shaara) - The greatest piece of historical fiction that I have encountered. A chronicle of the battle of Gettysburg that never forgets that these were real men with real beliefs and real fears, on both sides of the lines.

4. Watership Down (Richard Adams) - The greatest fantasy journey ever written (suck it, Tolkien).

5. The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro) - Ishiguro's look into the damage of "forgetting" on the souls of individuals and of nations.

Now replacing House of Leaves with Lonesome Dove. Making the new list..

It
East of Eden
The Prince of Tides
The Lord of the Flies
The Haunting of Hill House
A Boy's Life
Never Let me go
1984
Lonesome Dove
Deliverance

Totto Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
The Pothunters by P.G. Wodehouse

[Updated]

Moby Dick 
Crime and Punishment
Madame Bovary 
The Portrait of a Lady
The Sorrows of Young Werther

As for non-fiction picks: Ernt Gambridge's Story of Art... HM: Rousseau's Confessions.