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I read this book while on holiday in New Mexico a few years ago, and it totally changed the way I see the world. I'm so glad to hear that you loved it. Between the two of us we should see if we can put together a half decent thread in non-fiction.

What an enchanting introduction. It is truly a pleasure to meet you Kate. Thank you for sharing of yourself, and welcome.

I just finished this book, and my soul is still a little bit raw. I'm left feeling emptied out, like a cracked and brown leaf in late autumn, begging to be crumbled into dust so that I can just blow away. Forgive me if you feel I'm too harsh. I literally just set this book down, and it still stings. I'll try to come back and do better when the pain has dulled somewhat.

I'm delighted to see Ender's Game listed by so many of you. It is undoubtedly one of my favorite books. I've read it many many times. With that said, its not in my five. If I were able to compel you to read five books, I would choose the five that would change your perspective, and maybe change the world. 1. Replay by Ken Grimwood - It will change the way you look at your life, and what is truly important. 2. Watership Down by Richard Adams - Loyalty, Bravery, & Brotherhood in the face of Tyranny. 3. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond - Racism debunked. Civilization's true origin revealed. 4. On the Road by Jack Kerouac - Step outside your comfort zone and seize your dreams by the tail. 5. The Republic by Plato - Specifically The Parable of the Cave. Perception and reality while related are not synonymous. Honorable mentions: 1984, Farenheit 451, The New Testament, Catch-22, The Diary of Anne Frank.

You flatter me. Thank you.

Rawr and Sara, your two poems just jumped on to my list of all-time favorites. Thanks for sharing. =) Mine will bring the collective IQ of the group down, but I love it nonetheless. Casey At The Bat by Ernest Thayer The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day; The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play, And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same, A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game. A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast; They thought, "If only Casey could but get a whack at that

Well said BookJumper. In truth, I feel that not only can we discern which books have the makings of a classic, but it is our love of those books (and how we share that love with others) that will ultimately propel those works to the apex of the literary world. As we pass our love of certain works on to future generations, we play a part in the making of a classic.

Yet another late night immersed in the thoughtful words of you all. Thanks very much for sharing so much of yourselves here. It has truly been a pleasure.

That's awesome. My key chain is Darth Tater.

Is that R2D2 next to the teddy bears? I'm too ashamed to show you my books. Sadly, they are still in boxes in the basement, waiting for me to build the shelves in the "library." God only knows when I'll get the opportunity. At present the space is filled with toys belonging to my two year old son.

48 and counting. Its rather funny really. It's almost as if the BBC had the same reading list as my high school and college professors. I read many of these books at the direction of my teachers. 23 of them in fact! 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible - 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 8 1984 - George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 34 Emma - Jane Austen 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen- 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy- 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel 52 Dune - Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens- 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez- 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov- 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac- (One of my all-time favorite books.) 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker- 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses - James Joyce 76 The Inferno - Dante- 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal - Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - 80 Possession - AS Byatt - 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read White Fang by Jack London in one sitting over 30 times. At least 20 of those were snowy / rainy days at "camp" in northern Maine. As I sit here writing about it, I realize that its been far too long. My dog-eared and weathered old copy is still sitting on the end table, next to the heinous orange plaid couch in the "living room" of "camp."

Amazing. I really need to pick this book up. The passage you've quoted works on my spirit at so many different levels. What beautiful, vile, hateful, and loving creatures we humans are.

Thank you all for the warm welcome. Maureen, I feel really fortunate to have been born into a Mainer's life. I was raised on Stephen King, and Thoreau's Maine is only an hour's drive away. Thanks to my father's love of the wilderness, I've had countless opportunities to experience Nature in Maine. It may not always be pleasant, but it is always beautiful. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

In all honesty, I can't say I loved Harry the entire time. It was hard for me to like him due to all his anger issues. My wife helped me to forgive Harry by reminding me of my own childhood. There is a time in every young man's life when anger and affront are incredibly difficult feelings to suppress. In my opinion Rowling did a masterful job of capturing that journey from boy to young man. While Harry's humanity didn't always make him likeable, it made him more real to me, and therefor more lovable.

Bookjumper, Your assessment of I am Legend is spot on! I can vividly remember how I felt after reading the novella for the first time. Unbeknownst to me, the book I purchased also included a collection of short stories. It may seem like nothing, but this one fact had sinister implications. Imagine if you will, that you are holding a book which you believe to be one novel. It couldn't have been more perfect. It give me a unique opportunity to be totally surprised/amazed by the conclusion. I'll never be able to experience the story that way again, but I'll also never forget it. It was such a witty and poignant message about perspective, and good and evil. While I felt the movie was entertaining, it had none of the depth and wittiness which infused the novella. After watching the film, I felt certain that Matheson must have hated how it turned out. Thanks to some quick wikipedia and goggle research I learned that multiple "adaptations" have been made from I am Legend. The Omega Man, and The Last Man on Earth, if you can believe it, are "film adaptations" of I am Legend. Given how far these movies strayed from the subject, my perspective changed a bit, and when I learned of the alternate ending to the movie, which is true to the original story, I had to rent the DVD and watch the movie again. On the topic of Eragon, I would definitely recommend the book to any fan of Young Adult Fiction. If you're looking for good read (nothing high-brow here) you'll love the Eragon series. Paolini is a gifted story-teller, and Eragon is a real page turner.

Its almost 4AM, and I'm still scrolling through posts! I should have been in bed hours ago. What started as a google search for more information on Jose Saramago has ended with countless hours of forum trolling. Curse you BookClubForum!! I'll see you tomorrow.

I'm ashamed to admit it, but before tonight I had never heard of David Mitchell. Your post, and a few others expressing admiration for Cloud Atlas, piqued my interested, and so I started digging. I found this, and I thought you might like it. "Writing is a strange business transaction, which occurs largely between the imaginations of complete strangers who will stay complete strangers...." ~ David Mitchell interview http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1100/mitchell/interview.html