The "Top 5 Favorite Books" list from High Fidelity

Raymond Chandler made a career of scratching the shiny parts off of L.A.’s image; this story, which unfolds at the place where wealth, addiction, venality and murder intersect, set the standard.

We first meet Philip Marlowe on a cloudy Los Angeles day as he leaves home to meet his new client, oil millionaire General Sternwood. He gives us a status report: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” The moment he crosses the threshold of the Sternwood mansion, he and the reader begin a journey into darkness and death. The General is a fading corpse flower of a man who shivers while swathed in blankets in his overheated greenhouse. The two Sternwood daughters — vicious, infantile Carmen and arrogant but appealing Vivian — are trouble personified. The General initially hires Marlowe to deal with a potential blackmail matter involving Carmen, but the detective is quickly sucked into a vortex of overlapping motives, secrets within secrets and at least six violent deaths. It’s a book that fulfills the most important goals of mystery writing: it is a page turner that keeps the reader guessing right up to the end, and then presents a solution that seems inevitable. Chandler trivia: Although Chandler was also a screenwriter — he wrote “Double Indemnity” and the 1951 screenplay for “Strangers on a Train” — William Faulkner was the head writer on Howard Hawks’ 1946 film of “The Big Sleep.”

Far better and scarier than his Silence of the Lambs. Harris tells the unforgettable and gripping tale of a psychopathic killer and his motivations. You root for the police to catch up to him and stop him but you can see how the killer became the monster he is. This book also serves as the introduction to Hannibal Lecter — and no, he's not the bad guy, not in this book.

This book totally defines the cyber-punk genre; it was so vivid and yet seemed so utterly plausible the first time I read it. Now that the Internet rules the world, I am in awe of the creative mind that yielded this novel.

One of the truly great and disturbing war novels of modern time. Yes, it is sick, twisted, depraved and includes the Holocaust and a porn star named Montana Hilhack (a vision of Miley Cyrus' future?) — but that's what makes it so jarring.

"High Fidelity" has been one of my favorite movies for many years, and it has now become one of my favorite books. The protagonist, Rob, is a thirty-something guy in a relationship crisis. He questions his life in relationship to friends, family, music, and love. However, Hornby takes what could be a difficult scenario and turns it into an honest account of what it feels like to have real self doubt. The book is funny, meaningful, and ultimately true to the mistakes we all make and the lovely redemption that follows. Now I've got to go watch the movie again...