The First Posting

Ok, here it goes.

It started as simply putting together "The Big List of 100 Books You May Want to Read" for my 22 month old son.

When my wife went into labor I started a sort of diary of the whole birth process. Taking notes on contraction length and time between contractions, plus jotting down various stuff that went shooting through my head. Starting as "Feed rabbits, Get out hospital bag, Find cell phone" to "Your Mom just passed the mucus plug. She said it looked like a candy. I asked her not to tell me what kind of candy" to a description of the cafeteria food. By the way New York Presbyterian makes a wicked biscuit in the morning. Little butter and jelly, great pick me up after 7 hours of labor. After that it turend into part a sort of a history of being a first time parent, so that should he ever have kids he may have an idea what to expect and a nice history of his early childhood. The other part is tips on marriage, college, love, work, vacations, kids, money and such. Just stuff I have learned over the years, usually because I screwed something up and did not want him to make the same mistakes I did. No parent does.

Then I decide to put together a list of the 100 books I think he should/might want to read during his life. Well, putting together a list of 100 books is tougher than I thought. The first couple of dozen were easy. The next couple of dozen were not as easy. Sure every once and a while I would remember some group of authors or a genre that I had earlier missed, but by the time I hit 70 I was running dry.

One thing you should know as back story is that I work in Manhattan but live in Woodstock. Technically I live in a town right outside of Woodstock, but if I tell people I the name of the town they just assume it is some small town in Westchester, and look at me funny when I bitch about my commute. If I tell them Woodstock, even if they have no idea where it is, they know it is far away. And it is. I commute 5 hours a day. On a good day. Assuming there is no traffic accidents on the Thruway and such. Bad day can run 7 or 8 hours a day. A good day means two and a half hours each way. Thirty minute drive from my house to the last stop before the bus goes express. Then and hour and a half bus ride, hopefully. After a subway ride and a couple of block walk. If the train is right there is can be as short as 15 minutes, but usually the train is not right there. One time I was on a train in the tunnel when the train in front of us had mechanical difficulties. 45 minutes later I was and the next stop, still two stops away from my stop. Anyone who rides the subway in New York City, or anywhere in the world, knows what I mean.

Most of the other people on the bus are like myself, transplanted New Yorkers. And for the record my wife and I owned the house prior to 9/11 and had been planning on moving up for a couple of years. Scary thing about the bus is that every month there is another person who becomes a regular. So many people do it daily that they have added more buses to the schedule in the year and a half that I have been doing it. You get to know people when you spend that much time together on a bus every day.

Funny, I ran into a guy on the bus who knew of my brother. He had gone to college with my brothers girlfriend. Also after my brother went from full time to freelance for a particular company, this guy started as fulltime there. Then a couple of weeks later my brother died and a lot of the guys that had known my brother told him all sorts of stories about him. He said everyone was really shaken up, as my brother was only 28 when he died. Never drank, did not do drugs. They never did figure out what had killed him. But I digress. . .

I live in a small town. So everyone knows me and my family and we know everyone else. We are on a first name basis with everyone at the local supermarket and diner. We know our butcher, the local produce guy and the ladies who work in the library. It is a small town. The only person we are not on a first name basis is the Sushi guy, only because we can't really pronounce his name. So we call him Sushi Man. We go to the same diner every weekend at the same time every Saturday and Sunday. It was always the same people. Some whose name we knew, some we did not.

During the last election people sort of stopped talking to people outside their own group of friends. Both on the bus and in the diner. We may be outside Woodstock, but it is the 'country'. So there were just as many Bush supports as there were Kerry supporters. Sometimes things on the bus would get heated as people argued about politics.

Well one Saturday I was in the local diner and I asked some friends at the next table what they thought should be on the list. The effect of the question was instantaneous and amazing. With in minutes people were discussing what should go on the list. This is important. They were actually discussing it. Listening to each others opinions about movies and books. Listening. No one adopted a hard line stance on anything. So I got some paper to write the suggestions down and everyone wanted to put their own list together. This is the other important thing: that people became very thoughtfully about "their list". Signing the bottoms of the pages. Same thing on the bus, people would actually talk to each other about it. These are people who a few months ago wanted nothing to do with each other.

So I ask you, what are your favorite 5-10 books and movies?

Any particular reason any of them are on there.

Every month I plan on putting up the list of top books and movies, based on peoples feedback.

Here is the current list of 129 books:

PLEASE NOTE that other than listing titles that have received multiple votes (and noting the number of votes) these are in no particular order.

1. Moby Dick - Melville - 4 votes
2. Lord of the Rings Trilogy - 4 votes
3. Ulysses - James Joyce - 3 votes
4. Illuminatus! - Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shae - 2 votes - First book to receive multiple votes & first book put on the list
5. Dune - 2 votes
6. Wuthering Heights - 2 votes
7. Any book - Kurt Vonnegut - 2 votes
8. 100 years of solitude - Garcia Marquez - 2 votes
9. Geek Love - 2 votes
10. Odyssey - 2 votes
11. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - 2 votes
12. The Stranger - Albert Camus - 2 votes
13. Waiting For Godot - Samuel Beckett - 2 votes
14. Watchmen - 2 votes
15. Junkie - William S. Burroughs - 2 Votes
16. Silence of the Lambs- 2 Votes
17. The Illuminati Papers - Robert Anton Wilson
18. The Big Book of Conspiracies - Robert Anton Wilson
19. The Stand - Stephen King
20. It - Stephen King
21. Portable Beat Reader - many writers (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs)
22. Kane & Abel
23. Getting Things Done
24. The Prince
25. Green Eggs and Ham - Dr. Seuss
26. Still Life with Woodpecker - Robbins
27. Lance Armstrong's first book
28. The World According to Garp
29. A good biography on Abraham Lincoln
30. Fountainhead
31. Good Omens - Neil Gaimen and Terry Pratchet
32. Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman
33. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72, - Hunter Thompson
34. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter Thompson
35. Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel - Groucho and Chico Marx
36. Winnie the Pooh
37. Monkey, A Journey to the West
38. As Told at the Explorers Club
39. Old Man and the Sea - Hemmingway
40. Neuromancer - William Gibson
41. The Wizard of Oz series - Frank L Baum
42. Athletic Shorts - Chris Crutcher or anything else by him
43. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
44. Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
45. L.A. Confidential - James Elroy
46. In Search of Schrödinger's Cat - John Gibbons (non fiction)
47. Don't smoke grass on my father's lawn (son of Charlie Chaplin),
48. Zen and art of Motorcycle Maintenance
49. The Pirate Lafayette,
50. Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
51. Iliad - Homer
52. Maltese Falcon
53. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
54. Catcher and the Rye - Salinger
55. Snow Ghosts (also called The Snowstorm)
56. The Trial - Kafka
57. Great Gatsby
58. Middlemarch - George Eliot
59. Gone with the Wind
60. On the Road
61. The Son Also Rises - Hemmingway
62. Oxbow Incident
63. Paradise Lost
64. Borstal Boy
65. An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
66. Gulliver's Travels
67. 1984
68. Good Earth
69. Three Musketeers
70. White Noise
71. Foucault's Pendulum
72. Pharmakopia
73. Warriors of God
74. The Tipping Point
75. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
76. Love in the time of Cholera
77. Rule of the Bone - Russell Banks
78. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
79. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
80. Madam Bovary
81. Cloudsplitter - Russell Banks
82. The Rites of Spring - Madras Eckstein
83. The Proud Tower
84. Dreadnought - Robert Massie
85. The Great War and Modern Memory
86. The Big Sea - Langston Hughes
87. Winter Soldier - Robert Ketchum
88. The Cousins' War
89. The Third Chimpanzee - Jared Diamond
90. In Dubious Battle - Steinbeck
91. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
92. Crime and Punishment - Fydor Dostoyevsky
93. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
94. Collected Stories - Franz Kafka
95. Collected Stories - Edgar Allan Poe
96. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
97. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 1
98. Animal Farm - Orwell
99. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
100. Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
101. Beowulf
102. The Collected Star Man comics - James Robinson
103. Green Arrow, Archers Quest - Brad Meltzer, Phil Hester
104. For Whom the Bell Tolls---Hemingway
105. Tom Sawyer - Mark Tawain
106. Alone---Byrd
107. Anything by Kipling
108. Anything by Cussler
109. In the Heart of the sea---Plhilbrick
110. The Firm---Grisham
111. Shackleton
112. Flyboys---Bradley
113. Meditations on First Philosophy - Descartes
114. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - John Locke
115. The Power of Myth - Joseph Campbell
116. Science and Human Values - Bronowski
117. Confronting Silence - Toru Takemitsu
118. Poetics of Music - Igor Stravinsky
119. The Dilbert Principle or The Way of the Weasel - Scott Adams
120. Walden - Thoreau
121. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
122. The Abs Diet - David Zinczenko
123. Battle Cry Freedom
124. Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller
125. DareDevil - Frank Miller
126. Tomb of Dracula - Marv Wolfman
127. Swamp Thing - Alan Moore
128. Civil War - Shelby Foote
129. The Collected Calvin & Hobbes

Here is the current movies list:

1. Lord Of the Rings Trilogy - 4 votes
2. Star Wars: Episode 4 A New Hope - First movie put on the list - 3 votes
3. Casablanca - 3 votes
4. Manchurian Candidate (original) - 2 votes
5. Ghost Dog 2 votes
6. The Sound of Music - 2 votes
7. Clerks - 2 Votes
8. Rashomon - 2 votes
9. Gone With the Wind - 2 votes
10. Empire Strikes Back - 2 votes
11. 10 Commandments - Original with Charlton Heston - 2 votes
12. Jaws - 2 votes
13. The Godfather - 2 votes
14. Return of the Jedi
15. The Thin Man
16. BeastMaster
17. The Shining
18. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
19. Young Frankenstein
20. Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
21. Dogma
22. Seven Samurai
23. The Cocoanuts with The Marx Brothers
24. Abbot & Costello meet Frankenstein
25. Project A - Jackie Chan
26. Robin Hood with Errol Flynn
27. Battle of the Bulge - Henry Fonda
28. Blade Runner
29. For a Few Dollars More
30. Princes Bride
31. Manchurian Candidate (remake)
32. Fight Club
33. The Incredibles
34. Die Hard
35. The Zero Effect
36. The Passion of the Christ
37. The Greatest Story Ever Told
38. Dune
39. Kung Fu - David Carradine, Made for TV
40. Bowling for Columbine
41. Royal Tenenbaums
42. Brain Candy
43. The Big Lebowski
44. Children of Paradise
45. Citizen Kane
46. Modern Times
47. North By Northwest
48. The Seventh Seal
49. Singing in the Rain
50. Wizard of Oz
51. Bridge of the River Kwai
52. Hello Dolly
53. The Quiet Man
54. The Godfather 2
55. West Side Story
56. They were expendable
57. Bells of St. Mary's
58. The Wolf Man,
59. Out of Africa,
60. Dracula (Original with Bella Ligousi),
61. A Wonderful Life,
62. Apocalypse Now,
63. Bridges of Madison county,
64. The Thing (original)
65. Forest Gump
66. Exorcist
67. Goodfellas
68. Aliens
69. Re-animator
70. Animal House
71. Silence of the Lambs

Next time I post I will update the list as well as adding some of the reasons people gave for putting a particular movie or book on the list.

Have a good day.