Dave In The Cave Fave Five: Books And Whatnot Dept .

Oh, great, you say, Books. Fantastic, Dave. All out of meme-worthy internet trending material? No more amusing pictures of cats left to re-post? GEEZ! Some guy's front seat rap performance not good enough to post for you, Mr. In The Cave? And what exactly is this "reading" you speak of? Are books like really long blogs er something, man? YAWN.

Yeah that's the stuff, ain't?

Yeah, that's great. So, kicking off that list of my five fave books, we'll start with the first book I ever trekked through all the way to the end.

Your time with a book is like a long relationship, and by the time I got to end of this, I felt like I'd been married and traveled for years and what was I, seven, eight? Felt like I had been right there behind the boy in this story, following him and his dogs. Seen sights together, like the bit where the kids are using the coal chute as a slide. And then, well, you know where this story ends, don't you? I hit that bit in the dead of night, the only one awake in the house, tears just streaming down my face. Other bits of my life may be a blur before and after, but if I think about the final pages of that book, I'm right back there in 1974. And that was forty years ago. Jesus. Reading is time travel.

Still have this one. Red spine, white cover. Split into two sections, the first half author Jules Feiffer's reminiscences and essays about the effect comic books had on his upbringing, the second half huge gorgeous reprints of your comic books basics in their original incarnations, the first Batman, way more twisted than you'd expect, Wonder Woman, the first Superman, you know, the real stuff. Messages from another time. Laced through with the author's insanely urbane wit. The ten year loved the comics half. The older me came around later to the first half. Books morph, shift and refract over time.

Speaking of a book that morphs and changes, there is this, This is the most damnable book ever. If a book is a relationship, this is something of an abusive one. I don't even know where to begin...or end, with this. Winnowing it down to the simple explanation, the Kid comes to the wasted isolated city of Bellona, and a whole bunch of wacked out poetically rendered #$#@! happens. Or...doesn't. "-wound the autumnal city"

And did I mention that the books is a huge circle, the ending connected to the beginning like this:

But I still hear them walking in the trees: not speaking.

Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of
the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland into the

hills, I have come to

If you let it into your bloodstream, this book can change your perception of damn near EVERYTHING. On the other side, no author less than Harlan Ellison has said, "I must be honest. I gave up after 361 pages. I could not permit myself to be gulled or bored any further. I thought it was awful, still do ... I ... threw it against a wall."

And speaking of Ellison:

When I was a kid, my mom joined the book club and thus I spent the greater part of my childhood familiar with the great old ones, Asimov, Pohl, Simack, Silverberg, Heinlin, and in amongst these men, the fly in the ointment, the troubled child, irascible, irritable, prickly force of nature, Harlan Ellison, who sole purpose on this earth was to write, to rip aside the skin of hypocrisy and untruth to get to the beating heart of humanity underneath. Ellison writes like a man possessed, his demons lighting his ass on fire, his typewriter a weapon. So when he kicked science fiction in the soul, shoved aside the square jawed and bug eyed monsters of the fifties and herded the edgiest writing in the field under one umbrella, called it "speculative fiction" and unleashed it on the world under the name "Dangerous Visions", the pillars of the world shook. This was a heck of a thing to drop on a ten year old, and I am forever grateful for it. Books as bombs, baby.

This is the first book of the Discworld series By Terry Pratchett, who described it as "an attempt to do for the classical fantasy universe what Blazing Saddles did for Westerns."

I absolutely love this flat world Pratchett has created, populated with all manner of wacky characters, from vampires to werewolves to Death and his horse, Binky. There's a character on our morning show named Binky. My son, Sam, is named after Sam Vimes, head of the Watch in the books, my fave character, a man who later in life finds himself the head of a family. And that's what these books mean most to me, this extended literary family, wacky as hell on the surface, but still recognizably human underneath. The author's recent ongoing battle with Alzheimer's saddens me greatly, as if the world he created is slowly being shut behind a door he soon will no longer be able to open.

P.S: Speaking of fantasy, the band Uriah Heep made classic rock that sounded like the painting on a seventies van looked. Find out more about them HERE!