My 5 for Your 5

Now for the posting I intended to offer (before my editorializing self got in the way). But perhaps the previous posting did till the soil for this one, which I suppose invokes my call for postings that are both serious and frivolous (sometimes simultaneously). Anyway, in the spirit of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, and harkening back to some of Kate's "get-to-know-you"s during the orientation week, and with an eye towards sensing your literary/aesthetic proclivities, would you be willing to share a list of, say, the "Top 5 literary works that you can't imagine proceeding through the rest of your life without"? (I'm now thinking of the title of one of U2's recent cds, "All that You Can't Leave Behind"? You get the idea). Or, if that's too intimidating, you can tweak the category any way you wish (Top 5 literary works that you get jazzed about, etc.). Annotations are optional! Here's what I might offer (at least at this particular moment):

• To the Lighthouse, Virgina Woolf: a positively luminous novel, filled with sentences to marvel at, similes to die for, and emotional richness that comes up differently for me every time. The one novel (and perhaps the one writer) I could least afford to do without.
  
• The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje: blend a poet with a novelist, mix in some post-War and postmodern uncertainty, and get something magical like this.
• "The Dead," James Joyce: so exquisitely rendered, and so devastatingly understated until that stunningly musical coda. A wonderfully teachable story, too.
• Omeros, Derek Walcott: in my opinion, the most magisterial and stunning feat of poetic inspiration I've ever encountered. A 7,000 line epic poem may not be for everyone, but yet it has it all: it's technically dazzling, thematically intense, and just plain fun.
• Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie: another remarkably capacious imaginative work, and a page turner to boot. It quite possibly deserves its designation by some as the most important novel of the past fifty years.
  

Well, I guess that's my five, but I'm also a sucker for a good Victorian novel once in awhile (especially Thomas Hardy, who has such great titles, too, like Far From the Madding Crowd) ... and I could surely make a case for including The Lord of the Rings in my list of 5 ... and then there are all the poems I might have mentioned (at this particular moment in our annual earthly voyage, I'm reminded that Keats's "To Autumn" means as much to me as almost any other work of literature). If you don't leave me hanging, maybe in subsequent weeks we'll need to move on to music and movies!