Top 5 Favorite Books of all time

As I'm struggling to write on a subject worthwhile, I've decided to do something fun and list my top five favorite books.

1. A Tale of Two Cities: I would say almost anything by Charles Dickens is worth reading, but this is my favorite. I'm a big fan of redemption, and although it's sentimentality can be seen right through, I'm a sucker for it. The only book where I had to hold back the tears.

2. A Catcher in the Rye: I'm in love with J.D. Salinger at the moment having just finished his "Nine Stories" and "Franny and Zooey". Amazingly I just read this classic of teenage angst this year and like many I fell in love with it at the moment I read it. I was surprised with how funny it was, I didn't feel depressed at all when I read it, and I found a voice I could relate to like so many who have discovered it.

3. Nicholas Nickleby: My second Dickens book on the list was one of the first of his I read. This is classic Dickens that has a labyrinth of characters, and vast descriptions. I get pulled into his worlds so quickly I never want to leave them. Many Dickens books have been turned into films, some of them into great ones, but the one thing a film cannot produce is the wonderful prose.

4. The Glass Key: I've read most of everything by Dashiell Hammett and love them all, he is the Godfather of hard boiled. If I were to pick one book by him to put on my list, it would be this. It's a mystery involving a character who plays both sides, you don't know where his loyalties lie but you always root for him, it's a classic.

5. A Farewell to Arms: Earnest Hemingway's tragic love story really changed the way I looked at books and reading in the first place when I first read it in high school. Hemingway has a writing style that's to the point, he holds his emotions on a tight reign, but it serves his stories well. I became a big fan of Hemingway afterwards and still am.

I focused on the novels I love above, but I also don't want to leave out the short stories of Anton Chekhov, a man I believe is the second greatest writer after Dickens, also Salinger's "Nine Stories", and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" which may just be the greatest thing I've ever read in my life.