Celebrity Top 5

each week, to encourage you to get involved in this 'vote for your 5 favourite books of all time in no particular order' thing we're doing, we've asked a behemoth of the book industry to tell us their own top 5.

To start us off, the mighty Scott Pack has sent us his list. Scott, for those of you who don't know, is head of the rather innovative publisher The Friday Project, who specialise in turning some of that stuff that we enjoy on the web into bookshaped objects to buy in bookshops. He also is better at gambling than me and a lot of other people too.
He has an extremely popular blog called Me and My Big Mouth (much more popular than ours), which is opinionated, true, false, endearing, annoying and slightly addictive.
Anyway, here is his top 5.

I am not entirely sure that these are necessarily my five favourite books but if you held a gun to my head right now and told me I could only save five books from my collection then these would be the ones I would choose.

5. The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I re-read it every couple of years and I have yet to find a flaw. Beautifully crafted. Wonderful tone. Gets better every time.

4. Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec. A true work of genius from a true genius. Based purely on the content alone it is a remarkable novel but when you find out how he wrote the thing it becomes a marvel.

3. A Wild Sheep Chase/Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. Apologies for the double choice and I am not sure if this omnibus is still available but these two classic early Murakami novels are always best read together. He has never quite topped them if you ask me.

2. The Satanic Mill by Otfried Preussler. Also known as The Curse of Darkling Mill. Without question the best children's book I have ever read. Better than Rowling, Pullman, Gaiman and the rest.

1. The Odyssey by Homer. The greatest story ever told. I would recommend the Richmond Lattimore or Robert Fagles translations but, to be honest, you can't go far wrong with any of them.

Thanks Scott.

please feel free to vote for your top 5 by emailing, phoning, coming into the shop, carrier pigeon etc.
JUST MAKE SURE YOU VOTE......
More info on the survey here. Click on this sentence that i'm writing now to get to the votey bit.