Greetings from Kerhonkson, New York!  I haven’t written a post in a while, and I have some time to kill before everything at the NERFA convention begins for the day, so I thought I’d be productive.

Top 5 Lists

Have you seen the film High Fidelity?  The main character is obsessed with top 5 lists.  At the time, this just struck me as quirky, and I didn’t think too much about it – until, through my friend Matt Gourlie, I read the book the movie was based on, written by Nick Hornby.  After reading the book, I found myself constantly compiling top 5 lists of everything around me.  I still keep a running tally in my head of the main lists; so it only makes sense to share them with you.

But first, I should say a few words about Matt.  I’ve known him since we were 6 years old, we were in Grade 1 together at Massey Elementary School.  A few years later his family moved just down the street from mine, so I saw him pretty often.  We went to high school together, and university as well, where he studied Journalism.

Matt was always current on popular culture, sports, and news.  He’s so deeply knowledgable about so many different things, it’s impressive.  From very early on, Matt was the one who introduced me to new music, films, books, etc.  It’s because of him that I first discovered artists like Captain Beefheart, Sonic Youth, Hal Hartley, the Avalanches, the Boredoms, Godspeed, Lester Bangs, David Cronenberg, Quentin Tarantino, and of course Nick Hornby.

Thanks, Matt!

My Top 5 Favorite* Books

1. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
2. In Watermelon Sugar, by Richard Brautigan
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
4. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
5. The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkein

*Note: “Favorite” is not equivalent to “best.”  “Favorite,” to me, means that even if I don’t think it’s the best thing in the world, I can experience something over and over again, and always enjoy the experience, and always find some new and different meaning in the experience.