books comedy food movies music

1. Beyond the Mountain, Steve House
2. Snatch
3. Pineapple Express
4. Katy Perry
5. Blueberry Pie
6. Tea
7. Flight of the Conchords

1. “Lucinda/Ain’t Goin’ Down to the Well”- Tom Waits^W
2. Singers
3. Later recordings of Robert Johnson^W
4. Boardwalk Empire on HBO
5. Shuffels
6. Marvin Pontiac (Read this:John Lurie^W!)
7. Shakers
8. Dashiell Hammett^W
9. Pigeon, Patrick Suskind
10. Sinners

1. The Tempest, William Shakespeare^W
2. Serenity
3. America Magazine
4. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
5. Clueless
6. The Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries
7. Bossypants, Tina Fey
8. Mary Russell^W Mysteries, Laurie R. King
9. The New America, Bad Religion
10. Mack The Knife, Ella Fitzgerald^W

1. The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel, Nick Cave
2. Strangeland, Tracey Emin
3. The King’s Speech (“I was a sceptic, but it’s brilliant”)
4. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10
5. Jessie J’s cover of the Naked and the Famous’ ”Young Blood”
6. August Sander^W ‘s photography
7. Miranda (TV series on BBC)
8. Arsenic & Old Lace
9. Victor Hugo’s Delicatessen in Edinburgh (by the Meadows)
10. Kitchen, Nigella Lawson

1. “Bob Dylan’s 49th Beard,” Wilco^W
2. The Dark Is Rising, Susan Cooper
3. German
4. Danish Butter Cookies
5. Bock^W
6. Devotion to the Cross, Pedro Calderon de la Barca^W
7. Scotland Yard Family Game
8. Contact Mics
9. Mille Bornes Card Game
10. “Madame George” Van Morrison^W

1. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape
2. Blood In The Ashes, William Johnstone
3. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx
4. The Devil Makes Three
5. The Rugrats Movie
6. Toast Machine
7. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
8. Electric Apricot
9. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
10. Sunday jams at the Phoenix Theater

“I’m just a normal young musician with a lot more to learn in music and even life.”

1. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow ” Israel Kamakawiwo’ole^W
2. Tommy Boy
3. V for Vendetta
4. The Confession(?)
5. Disney Movies

1. French films, especially Amélie & La Femme Nikita
2. This House of Sky, Ivan Doig
3. ”Brown Eyed Girl” * Van Morrison^W
4. English Premier League Football, Arsenal (see Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby)
5. Best in Show
6. Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke or pretty much any poem he ever wrote
7. ”The Sweetest Thing” & ”Running to Stand Still” U2
8. i thank you God for most this amazing day… E. E. Cummings^W
9. Romeo + Juliet ( Shakespeare, Zefferelli & Baz Luhrman)
10. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
    

*follow the link to hear Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” on youtube!

“Thanks for the advice about getting stuck on producing the ”ultimate” list. I could either create 30 different lists of ten or spend way too much time trying to make a perfect one–which takes some of the fun out of it. This is a great idea for a site The only difficulty was to not just create a list made up entirely of other people’s top ten.”

1. My daughter
2. A Love Supreme, by John Coltrane
3. Travels with My Aunt, by Graham Greene
4. Mondovino
5. Good Mexican food
6. The smell of the sea on a hot and stormy day
7. Amadeus
8. Five Leaves Left, Nick Drake
9. The White Ribbon
10. Bali^W

1. Citizen Kane
2. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare^W
3. Ulysses, James Joyce
4. piano concerto no. 1, Tchaikovsky*
5. Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
6. My Parents
7. The courage to be mild
8. Mac Computer
9. German Board Games
10. Richard Burton^W

*follow the link to listen to Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 1 on youtube!

1. Already Dead, Denis Johnson
2. Enter Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Wu-Tang Clan
3. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
4. Canticle V (The Death of St. Narcissus), T.S. Eliot^W
5. The Celebration
6. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco
7. Oblivion: Stories, David Foster Wallace
8. Lonesome Crowded West, Modest Mouse
9. Marcel Duchamp*
10. Hocus Pocus, Kurt Vonnegut

*follow the link to a cool website about Marcel Duchamp!

1. Languages
2. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffeneger
3. “One,”  U2*
4. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
5. “Changes,” Tupac Shakur^W
6. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
7. “Livin’ on a Prayer,” Bon Jovi
8. Sex and the City (the show!)
9. The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
10. Henry and June, Anais Nin

*Follow the link to hear “One,” by U2, or access the complete album, Achtung Baby, here.

1. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, Benjamin Hale
2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
3. Pumpkin Spice Granola
4. 20 under 40
5. Down comforters
6. “Wax & Wire,” * Loch Lomond
7. The New Abs Diet
8. Parks & Recreation

*follow the link to listen to Loch Lomond’s “Wax & Wire” and download their album,  Night Bats, here.

1. Raincoats, Raincoats
2. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
3. Francois Truffaut^W and Jean-Pierre Léaud^W
4. “Gloomy Sunday,” * Rezso Seress
5. The short stories of Roald Dahl^W
6. Love and Death
7. Myrna Loy^W and William Powell^W
8. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
9. Parks and Recreation
10. tUnE-yArDs

1. All Quiet on the Western Front,  Erich Maria Remarque
2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
4. A Lion’s Tale: Around the World in Spandex, Chris Jericho
5. A Time to Kill, (movie and the book), John Grisham
6. The Bible
7. The Rose That Grew From Concrete, Tupac Shakur
8. Me Against the World, Tupac Shakur
9. The Pursuit of Happyness

1. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
2. “Echidna’s Arf” and “Don’t you Ever Wash that Thing?” from Frank Zappa’s Roxy & Elsewhere
3. Rock My Religion, Dan Graham^W
4. Darkness/Light/Darkness,* Jan Svankmajer^W
5. Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (10:00 every night on 640 KFI)
6. Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook, Sally Fallon
7. The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein
8. The World is a Beautiful Place,* Lawrence Ferlinghetti
9. The Wonderful World That Almost Was, Paul Thek
10. Mr. Show

Read Greta’s thoughtful explanations in The Magpie Blog!

1. The Food Network: Giada De Laurentiis , Paula Deen, and Ina Garten
2. “Act a Fool,” Lil John
3. Pretty Woman
4. ”The News,” Jack Johnson*
5. My aunt’s tamale pie recipe
6. Egg in a basket^W
7. 80 year old women in my body pump class
8. The Gipsy Kings
9. “Daughters,” John Mayer
10. “Kill them with kindness” (“Just the expression…it’s what I say to myself when I want to punch people.”)

*follow the link to listen!

1. Peter Max Paints America, Peter Max
2. Emily Post’s Etiquette
3. Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys
4. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones
5. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
6. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White
7. Anne of Green Gables (“the book, by Lucy Maude Montgomery AND the Kevin Sullivan films starring Megan Follows”)
8. Running Fence, Christo and Jeanne-Claude
9. Casey at the Bat, Ernest Theayer
10. The Gospel of John^W

“The music was the hardest part for me. I ended up choosing Exile because: a) I love the story of its recording; the Stones torn and frayed, on the run and holed up in the south of France, Marianne Faithful lazing around in the same leopard bikini for days, Keith and Anita Pallenberg, and b) the Stone’s best music came out of that time. If Doc Brown pulled up to my house in the DeLorean tomorrow, my first stop would be Villefranche-sur-Mer circa 1971.  Pet Sounds was easier for me because it’s just beautiful–”God Only Knows” brings tears to my eyes, and “Wouldn’t it Be Nice” always makes me smile.”

1. Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen^W
2. Shakespeare^W (“almost anything, esp. King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night“)
3. Philippa Gregory
4. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
5. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
6. Night, Elie Wiesel
7. The Road, Cormac McCarthy
8. The Heart of a Woman, Maya Angelou
9. The Count of Monte Cristo, Dumas
10. The Last Lecture
11. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

“I couldn’t contain it to only 10!”

1. The Horrors
2. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
3. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
4. The Mighty Boosh
5. Little Britain