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E-mail: geistlinger AT gmail.com

Everyone loves lists Books, Movies and so on

My Online Aggregator

Top 10 Lists

These items do not represent the best of any particular area, but my favorites (or least favorites, as noted). I also don't stick to 10 items per area; some more, some less. Get over it.

Items are not in any ranked order; currently (at launch), the order is alphabetical. Click on any link to get that list with comments on each item listed.

Why am I doing this? No particular reason - because I can, because I'll learn something (code and intellect) by doing so, and because it will give readers an insight into what I like/dislike. So you can more easily decide if it's worth coming here or not.

Books - Bios/Autobios/Memoirs

• A Christmas Memory - Truman Capote
• A Mathmatician's Apology - G.H. Hardy
• A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway
• Darkness Visible - William Styron
• Dear Theo - The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
• Night - Elie Wiesel
• Plainspeaking - Merle Miller
• Remembering Denny - Calvin Trillen
• The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Books - Brilliant Titles

• A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
• Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart - Joyce Carol Oates
• Concluding Unscientific Postscipt - Soren Kierkegaard
• Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I'm Kissing You Goodbye - Cynthia Heimel
• Giving Good Weight - John McPhee
• How We Die - Sherwin B. Nuland
• Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
• Moments of Being - Virginia Woolf
• On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover - Tess Slessinger
• Other Voices, Other Rooms - Truman Capote
• The Last Worthless Evening - Andre Dubus
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
• The Pugilist At Rest - Thom Jones
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Books - Computer

• Dynamic HTML - Danny Goodman
• Learning Perl - Randal L. Schwartz & Tom Christiansen
• Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming - Robert Vieira
• SQL for Dummies - Allen G. Taylor

Books - Essays

• A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
• Essays of E.B. White - E.B. White
• Giving Good Weight - John McPhee
• How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed - Slavenka Drakulic
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks
• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

Books - Fiction

• Catcher In the Rye - J.D. Salinger
• Centennial - James Michener
• Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
• Light in August - William Faulkner
• Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Sophie's Choice - William Styron
• The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
• The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone
• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
• The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
• The Trial - Franz Kafka
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
• To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Books - Non-Fiction

• A Year in the Maine Woods - Bernd Heinrich
• Broadsides From the Other Orders - Sue Hubbell
• Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
• Coming Into the Country - John McPhee
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - James Agee
• My Own Country - Abraham Verghese
• The Discoverers - Daniel Boorstin
• The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes
• The Mind of a Mnemonist - A.R. Luria
• The Song of the Dodo - David Quammen
• The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

Books - Overrated

• Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
• Prisoner of Sex - Norman Mailer

Books - Photography

• Certain Places - William Clift
• Diane Arbus: An Apeture Monograph - Diane Arbus
• Georgia O'Keeffe - A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz
• Lost Chicago - David Lowe
• Mirrors Messages Manifestations - Minor White
• Pictures From the New World - Danny Lyon
• The Americans - Robert Frank
• The Family of Man - Edward Steichen, curator
• The World of Jan Saudek - Jan Saudek
• Yosemite and the Range of Light - Ansel Adams

Books - Short Stories

• Labyrinths - Jorge Luis Borges
• Pricksongs and Descants - Roober Coover
• The Murphy Stories - Mark Costello
• The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction - R.V. Cassill, editor
• The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway - Ernest Hemingway
• The Stories of John Cheever - John Cheever

Classic Character Names

• Dr. Strangelove - Dr. Strangelove, Peter George
• Holly Golightly - Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote
• Ratso Rizzo - Midnight Cowboy
• Scrooge - A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
• Shylock - The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
• Travis Bickle - Taxi Driver

Classic Opening/Closing Lines

• Murphy's Xmas, Murphy Stories - Mark Costello
• A & P - John Updike
• A Christmas Memory - Truman Capote
• A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton
• A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
• All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
• Anna Karenia - Leo Tolstoy
• Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen
• Guests of the Nation - Frank O'Connor
• Nevsky Prospect - Nikolai Gogol
• Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce
• Rabbit Run - John Updike
• The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
• The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky - Stephen Crane
• The Country Husband - John Cheever
• The Dead - James Joyce
• The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
• The Stranger - Albert Camus
• The Trial - Franz Kafka
• Ulyssess - James Joyce

Good Book/Good Movie

• Being There
• One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest
• Out of Africa

Movies

• All That Jazz
• Amadeus
• Casablanca
• Fantasia
• Godfather - Part II
• Good Will Hunting
• Manhattan
• Network
• Out of Africa
• The Candidate
• Wonder Boys

Movies - Guilty Pleasures

• American President/Dave
• Animal House
• The Sound of Music

Movies - Holiday Flicks

• Charlie Brown Christmas
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• Scrooged
• White Chirstmas
• Yankee Doodle Dandy

Movies - Soundtracks

• Amadeus
• Apocalypse Now
• Big Chill
• Fantasia
• Stealing Beauty
• The Dish

Music - Best Classical Selections

• Fanfare For the Common Man/Rodeo/Appalachian Spring - Aaron Copland
• Late Symphonies - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Pictures At an Exhibition - Modest Mussorgsky
• Requiem (K.626) and Coronation Mass (K. 317) - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
• Rhapsody in Blue - George Gershwin
• Waltzes - Johann Strauss II

Music - Favorite Albums (non-classical)

• Blood On the Tracks - Bob Dylan
• Born to Run - Bruce Springsteen
• Late for the Sky - Jackson Browne
• Slow Turning - John Hiatt
• Who Knows Where the Time Goes? (Disc 3) - Sandy Denny
• Who's Next - The Who

Music - Hypnotic

• Bolero - Maurice Ravel
• Heroin - Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground
• Sweet Jane - As sung by the Cowboy Junkies on their Trinity Sessions CD

Music - Top Drug Songs

• Champagne and Reefer - Muddy Waters
• Heroin - Lou Reed/Velvet Underground
• Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds - Beatles
• Needle and the Damage Done - Neil Young
• The Pusher
• White Rabbit - Jefferson Airplane