top five today, listed in no particular order:
1. The Walkmen
2. Ella Fitzgerald
3. Eddie Cochran
4. Cher
5. Woody Guthrie
On the nightstand:
Leave It To Jeeves
Saki
Steppenwolf
Recent stuff:
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
Kingsley Amis: I Want It Now
Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One
Doug Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies
The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, edited by Tony Hillerman
David Niven: The Moon's A Balloon (autobiography)
Dorothy B. Hughes: The Expendable Man
John Steinbeck: East of Eden
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (!)
Hunter S. Thompson: Hell's Angels
Charles Bukowski: Ham on Rye
P.G. Wodehouse: Weekend Wodehouse
The Hobbit
Stephen Fry: Moab is My Washpot
The Chap Manifesto;
Isaac Asimov: I, Robot; Foundation; Foundation & Empire; Second Foundation; Foundation's Edge; Foundation and Earth
James Ellroy: The Dudley Smith Trio
Kurt Vonegut: Breakfast of Champions
George Orwell: 'Down and Out in London and Paris'
John Steinbeck: 'Cannery Row' & 'Tortilla Flats'
Vikram Seth: 'An Equal Music'
Peter Walker: 'The Fox Boy: The Story of An Abducted Child' (nonfiction, about a Maori boy "adopted" by the colonial governor of New Zealand.)
Ongoing love affairs:
BOOKS:
Hunter S. Thompson: The Proud Highway (his letters); The Great Shark Hunt; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Fear and Loathing in America; The Rum Diary.
Nelsen Algren: The Neon Wilderness; The Last Carousel.
William S. Burroughs: Junky; Queer.
Joseph Heller: Catch 22
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Jack Kerouac: On the Road; Big Sur
Bill Bryson: Made in America
James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man;
A Confederacy of Dunces (what's the author's name?)
other printed material:
The Guardian (UK), Surface Magazine, the Onion.
TELEVISION:
Eastenders
go home!