i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

hey, it's thursday! it's the new year! top five list! etc!

top five favorite novels. yours, that is. what are they? all-time favorite novels. graphic novels, children's fiction, anything goes. just talk to me, work is boring.

my list:

1. tender is the night, f. scott fitzgerald. god. i read this one in paris, in a bathtub in a hotel in montmartre, and it couldn't have been more appropriate or hit me harder. the scene where nicole gets dressed before she goes to sleep with tommy? slays me every time.

2. the time's traveler's wife, audrey niffenegger. not everyone who read this loved it like i do. but i did, i do, this is my chicago, this is a love story to end all love stories set in a city that i love.

3. beach music, pat conroy. my copy has been re-read so many times that the last time i re-read it, forty pages out of the middle fell out of the book into the bathtub. um.

4. tam lin, pamela dean. if you go and read the reviews of this on amazon.com, you'll see a lot of complaints that say "no one real talks like this." if you've read this? my friends talk like this. carleton students talk like this. like time traveler's wife, this book is about a place that i love very, very much, it is a fairy tale set in a place that was nothing but normal for me, and i adore it.

5. shoeless joe, w.p. kinsella. i of course prefer the thrill of the grass to even this one, but that's short stories, not a novel. and this - field of dreams is a good movie, but this book is a masterpiece of loving baseball.

come on, people, talk books with me. please? otherwise i might go out of my mind with boredom at work today.