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Jon has kindly got the ball rolling for this page:

Top Ten books!

Haruki Murakami - Wind Up Bird Chronicle

Daniel Quinn - Ishmael

Koushun Takami - Battle Royale

JRR Tolkien - Lord of the Rings

Haruki Murakami - Norweigen Wood

Max Brooks - World War Z

Audery Niffenegger - The Time Traveller's Wife

John Wyndham - The Day of the Triffids

Simon Armitage - Sir Gawain & The Green Knight

George Orwell - 1984

Why I choose the books I do.....

So far for book club I have chosen War of the Worlds by H.G Wells (in 2007), Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (in 2008) & The Midwich Cuckoo by John Wyndham (in 2009).

I have a random pattern for choosing my next reads while having several on the go, while passing between Fiction & Non-Fiction and from classics to a modern piece. Mostly I tend to stick away from Autobiographies, but I have read a great one by the comedian Robin Williams.

I picked up a book by Murakami on a recommendation from a friend called Lander, which has led to me read all of his works. On the other hand I do spend quite a bit of time in Waterstones, pick up 60's Sci-Fi novelettes (such as 'The Last Starship from Earth' by John Boyd) from Oxfam and trawl through Amazon. Sometimes I do choose a book from the front cover and a scan of the synopsis! As most other readers I have a pile of books that I am trying to plough through and I find a book for my mood, as with music.

Reading goes hand-in-hand with music and film for me, as an act of escapism.

The diversity tends to lead to a book that posses some sort of mysticism behind it and takes the reader from everyday events and general life. I tend to therefore lean to ones (books) with a surreal aspect to the plot and a tendency to a challenging element & melancholic atmosphere.

I remember certain books as a major part of my life such as 'Kafka on the Shore' which was the first Murakami book I read and led me to start learning the Japanese language, 'Captain Cook' by Richard Hough for the awe inspiring journey it described, finishing The Da Vinci Code by Darren Brown on a plane coming back from Italy and seeing the lights of London on a clear nights day, listening to Stephen Fry read Harry Potter novels and the world JK Rowling created, the beautiful story of the charge of the light brigade in 'Hell Riders' and the political story written in 'The Lion and the Unicorn' by Richard Aldous which describes Gladstone & Disraeli as if they were in the room with you and you in the Houses of Parliament. Lewis Carrol's book 'Alice in Wonderland' has to also be a book that as with all of the rest of the books mentioned, gives us a flight into the world of an authors imagination and shows us what can be achieved by the written word. For this I am grateful.

If you have any recommendations then please add it to the forum under one of my past choices as detailed above.