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Inlander:
One of my absolute favourite books is The Enormous Room by e. e. cummings.  It's an autobiographical, or at least lightly fictionalised, account of the time he spent in a French prison-camp during World War I, after he was arrested for, well, basically behaving in a cheekily e. e. cummings-like manner (he was an ambulance driver on the Western Front).  The thing that's so wonderful about the book is that where just about anybody else would write a really grim, miserable, and painfully "worthy" book, cummings absolutely rejoices in the situation in which he finds himself, especially the people with whom he's imprisoned: people who most of us would hate to be locked up with, but who cummings regards as the salt of the earth.  The Enormous Room is the ultimate feel-good book, and not in a superficial way: it will leave you with a huge grin on your face, in part because it's bloody funny and cummings has a wonderful turn of phrase, but also and more significantly because it's just so wonderfully human, rejoicing and embracing humans and all their flaws.  It's beautifully non-judgmental.

If you can, snap up the Penguin edition from a few years back, which has a glossary in the back translating the frequent (typically idiosyncratic) foreign-language phrases that appear throughout the book.

Thalia:
I just went to see Stay last night...I must say, I was VERY impressed, which doesn't happen easily when it comes to movies and me. For anyone who enjoyed Eternal Sunshine, you'll LOVE this...not only is the cinematography and transitions done beautifully, but the story is FANTASTIC!

If you enjoy using your brain and don't mind films where you're going, "eh?" a few times until you get closer towards the end, then this is a definite must see!!!

Bunnyman:
BOOKS
First Contract by Greg Costikyan.  The premise: The aliens arrive, offering impossibly advanced technology for reasonable prices, and earth's economy collapses overnight.  We follow one high-tech executive as his company fails, and his trek though California, meeting jew-hating bums, aging hippies, and a gun-happy Earth Uber Alles sci-fi writer who has become an overnight galactic success.  Fantastic satire.

MOVIES
Man Bites Dog(elaboration on the above): Warning, only for the truly hardcore, as it contains soem of the blackest comedy put to celluloid.  A camera crew follows the daily routine of a serial killer, filming an ultra-low-budget documentary picture.  The crew gets more nad more embroiled in the crimes until they are doing the killing themselves.  Brilliant stuff, because it taunts its audience mercilessly, making them laugh at rape, murder, and a very charismatic serial killer.

Garcin:
If on a winter's night a traveler, by Italo Calvino.

You, The Reader, pursue 10 morsels of stories in 10 different genres in libraries, bookstores, and totalitarian governmental archives around the world, fall and love with the Other Reader, and uncover a fiendish plot by Apocryphers to replace true texts with false.  

This is one of the key sources of inspiration for modern day bibliophile fabulism in the spirity of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas.  It's a sibling to Borge's Ficciones and Nabakov's Pale Fire.  Definitely one of my most enjoyable reading experiences.

practicality:
I recommend Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. It's a science narrative about the evolution of life forms, and then more specifically, the evolution of humans and close relatives. It's extremely interesting and well written. Go borrow or buy it.

Now.

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