You touch on another issue that's cropped up in my practice on multiple occasions: back injury.

I cannot count the number of patients whose downward spiral could be traced to a back injury. It's easy to dismiss it as an excuse, but I've seen it often enough to recognize that it's like being shot: sometimes it's luck on how bad it is, some people manage to overcome, and some people don't, but it's a very, very traumatic event where the cards are stacked against recovery.
The following anecdote highlights that issue and another as-yet-undiscussed: there are people who genuinely need pain medication, and there are addicts. It gets particularly thorny where those groups overlap.

As an example, one patient (we'll call him X) related how a morbidly obese man crashed his car into X's front yard. X was attempting to assist the man (who X did not realize was already dead) and threw his back out. He suffered over the next decade through multiple surgeries with the placement, removal, and replacement of pins and rods. (He showed me a plastic sack of parts from a previous surgery.)
In a case like this, several factors conspire against a person:
-Even with insurance, it's expensive. Every penny not spent on absolute essentials goes to medical costs.
-Chronic pain. Many of these people suffer from pain constantly and are perpetually medicated with increasing dosages of narcotic pain medications as their resistance builds. They become dependent.
-Inability to work, both due to the injury and inability to concentrate under constant medication, which in turn compounds the first problem

With the combination of unemployment, constant pain, and continuous medication (and possible dependence/addiction), often these people lose the will to properly care for themselves. As a dentist, I see this in people who gave up caring for their teeth, and then could not afford to fix them as they "rotted out". These rotten teeth become yet another source of infection and pain, and another reason they can't secure a job. X came to me to get the rest of his teeth taken out in preparation for dentures (yet another significant but necessary expense).
He neglected to inform me that he was being treated for chronic pain (and narcotic dependence) at a pain management clinic, but that's another issue.
The problem is that X was having all his teeth out, so post-operative pain is almost a certainty, but not only would you hesitate to give a recovered addict a narcotic Rx, but their tolerance to pain medication is so high that they actually need more than the average person to achieve relief. It's a Catch-22.

This isn't to say back injuries are absolutely life-ending, or to completely discount some degree of personal responsibility, but the recurring pattern of economic hardship, chronic pain, and drug dependence following these types of injuries is impossible to ignore.

>> ^robdot:
why is this a fail? can someone explain please. also, i have never had anything but hassles with nortons. the viruses i have had were not prevented by nortons.the two times i got serious viruses i had to format and start over,even wih nortons installed. so what was the point of nortons?? my previous comps networks were constantly seen by nortons as some kind of invasion and the program argued with my computers about it ) crashes ensued. i have had no anti virus for the last 3 years with no problems. i do use superspyware remover and spybot. they are the most useful.
for me nortons has always been worse than useless as it caused more damage than good.


right on. yea, its a catch 22... if you dont know what you're doing, Nortons is a false sense of securiity... and if you do... you don't need anti virus because you don't fuck around on the web.

freeware is the best solution if you need AV

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clark
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
The Stars my Destination - Alfred Bester
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
A High Wind in Jamaica - Richard Hughes
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
The Call of the Wild - Jack London

This list is the product of a few moments of reflection. I read many of these books when I was young but their subject matter combined with where I was in my life left me with indelible memories.

Also, the people above me have good taste.

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Dune - Frank Herbert
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


Those are 10 off the top of my head, in no particular order. Some I consider favorites, others made a strong enough impression that they always come to mind when someone asks a question like this.

*The Stars My Destination (Tiger! Tiger!) - Alfred Bester

*The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov

*On the Road - Jack Kerouac

*Zadig or Fate - Voltaire

*Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Honorable mention: The Forever War - Joe Haldeman

1. Lives - Plutarch
2. Aesop's Fables - Aesop
3. 1984 - George Orwell
4. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
5. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

Joseph Heller, "Catch-22"

most things by Vonnegut (esp. Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse-5, and Deadeye Dick)

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road"

Ronald J. Glasser, "365 Days"

Richard Bach, "Stranger to the Ground" (and many others)

Honourable mentions: William Gibson, "Neuromancer" -- Murray Peden, "A Thousand Shall Fall" (w/ Google Books preview) -- Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried" -- John Irving, "A Prayer For Owen Meany" -- George Orwell, "1984" -- , Nick Hornby, "High Fidelity" / "About A Boy" -- Roald Dahl, "Skin" / "Over To You" / many others -- Paul Theroux, "The Mosquito Coast" / "Half Moon Street" -- James Howard Kunstler, "The Long Emergency" (preview) -- Vladimir Nabokov, "Lolita" -- many by Bill Bryson -- J.D. Salinger, "The Catcher In The Rye" -- Andy McNab, "Bravo Two Zero" -- Jonathan Safran Foer, "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" -- Alice Sebold, "The Lovely Bones" -- Miriam Toews, "A Complicated Kindness" -- Antoine de St-Exupery, "Wind, Sand, and Stars" -- LGen Roméo Dallaire, "Shake Hands With The Devil" -- Ernest K. Gann, "Fate Is The Hunter" -- (and to be continued most likely)

for a fiction list slaughterhouse 5 and catch 22 are also in my top-10 as are Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and Faust. The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek also comes to mind. Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, some books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (can't choose) and ofcourse Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten.

I can never, ever remember the best ones when quizzed like this. Same goes for best movies etc.

Ones I have liked of late are (in no order):
The Dark Tower series: Stephen King
The Book Thief: Marcus Zusak
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Dave Eggers (Currently reading another of his books actually)
The Mars Trilogy: Kim Stanley Robinson
LOTR: Tolkien
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams
Many Discworld novels: Terry Pratchett
Dune: Frank Herbert
The Dressmaker: Rosalie Ham (An Australian gothic novel, just brilliant, I'd love to see this made into a film)
2010: Arthur C Clarke (Yeah, I like it better than 2001, sue me)


But inevitably someone will mention some book and I'll go 'AAAH, yeah, LOVED that one'!... so yeah, there are many others that I'm sure should be here, and probably in place of others here... (I just scrolled up and added some that others had put, because I'd forgotten them)...

Catch 22 : I just wanted to say that for all the praise that this book gets, I couldn't get through it. He made his points, set up his things, and then seemed to repeat the same damn jokes/observations over and over and over again to the point where I just stopped reading it... sorry, but it bored me. Good start, lost me soon after.

Kurt Vonnegut jr. is indeed the master. It's hard to pick just five, so this list might be a little random, but here are five books I have enjoyed immensely:

1. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut jr.
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
4. Mengele Zoo by Gert Nygårdshaug
5. The Brothers Karamasov by Fjodor Dostojevskij

I especially like the religious themes in Cat's Cradle; that's why I picked it out to be on the list. But I have yet to read a Vonnegut book I didn't like, so many others could be there as well.

I really recommend Mengele Zoo to anyone who hasn't heard of it. It paints a horrible picture of the exploitation of South America, and has a main character you instantly fall in love with.

What the heck, I'll throw in a few more:
Everything by Tolkien, the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin, The Eyes of the Dragon and the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, The Knights Templar series by Jan Guillou.

Seems that we like Kurt Vonnegut...

1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
2. Eunoia by Christian Bök.
3. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
4. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.
5. Hard to decide, perhaps The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris or "What If?" edited by Robert Cowley.

I've read so many great books that it's really hard for me to whittle it down to five that I think are the best, so I'm going to go with the first five that come into my head. I'm guessing that the first five must have made the greatest impression on me, so it's a reasonable place to start a favorites list.

1. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut is probably the single most influential author to me. His protagonists and story lines always clicked with me. It was like he was writing them just for me.

2. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Everyone's heard of this one, and it's considered by many to be one of the best novels of the 20th century. If you haven't read it yet, put it next on your to-read list. Notice my first two novels are both set in World War II. I don't know if that means anything or not.

3. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon. Considered by many to be Chabon's greatest work. I noticed you read one of his book's, dag. I think you owe it to yourself to read this one. I plan on reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union soon, because I've heard good things about it too.

4. The Trial - Franz Kafka. A dark novel, to say the least. To me it's about the absurdity of life and accepting fate. I don't believe in fate, but I sometimes wonder about the futility of existence. Can't help it.

5. The Foundation series - Isaac Asimov. Read the series when I was a teenager. The idea of being able to use science to not only predict but also control future events fascinated me, and that it was set in the future, complete with space travel, made it even more interesting. I liked how Asimov later was able to merge the Foundation series with the Robot series.

Other novels worthy of mention:

- Tropic Of Cancer - Henry Miller - Almost made the Top 5
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Breakfast Of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut
- 1984 - George Orwell
- Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
- God Knows - Joseph Heller
- Something Happened - Joseph Heller
- Ringworld - Larry Niven
- The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

I don't know if you meant to confine this to novels or not, but I'm going wider:

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Dune (whole series) - Frank Herbert
Live from Golgotha - Gore Vidal
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson

I'm actually in the middle of Cryptonomicon right now, but I'm already confident it belongs in that list. 5 is too short, anyway:

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Galápagos - Kurt Vonnegut
The Hobbit & LotR - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

There's probably a couple dozen I've forgotten at the moment, and there's a lot of other fantasy novels I really enjoyed, like Roger Zelazny's "Chronicles of Amber". But that's a good start.

This reminds me of that chapter in Catch-22 with McWatt and Kid Sampson, although this ends much more happily.

>> ^imstellar28:
my kind of protest. any links to the story?


They are protesting in front of parliment. We now have protests there every saturday at 15:00. People show up, 3-4 people hold speeches. These motorcyclists weren't an official part of the protest but wanted to do show support in this way. The flag the guy on the roof was raising is the flag of Bonus (icelandic Wal Mart, Tesco). The cops tried to get him but the crowd got him back and he ran away. I was very happy they didn't resort to spraying people with tear gas which they did this summer. When people are shouting at the police there they are saying "YOU ARE WORKING FOR US, NOT THEM". I suspect the police were this passive because most of them probably agree with the protesters.

Basically, Iceland is in turmoil. The credit crisis led to all of our 3 banks collapsing(12x the size of the GDP). It's down to a european trade agreement(can't remember the name in english). It gives companys all sorts of freedoms, some good, some not so good. It meant that our banks could operate anywhere in Europe. So, they went and started loaning in Holland, Germany and England. In England alone over 300.000 people had accounts (these accounts had very high interest rates). So.. when the banks couldn't get loans from other banks they started falling, they had expanded themselves way too much like everybody else. BUT.. while the law gave them freedom to operate in other countries, the banking license was still in Iceland. Which meant 310.000 people were now responsible for accounts of almost 500.000 people, many of which had high amounts in the accounts.

The Icelandic goverment started freezing the banks, to take over. A disputed act, but they couldn't really let the banks go bankrupt because then the country would have no way to buy anything, nobody would have any money. So when Gordon Brown saw what they were doing he talked to our goverment and they said they would probably be able to pay off what the law required of them (about 20-30.000 euros for each person I think). Somehow Gordon took that as us not being willing to pay. So next the British goverment froze all Icelandic assets in England (using the terrorist law) and declared Iceland as a bankrupt nation (even though the country itself had no debts and has been practically debtless for some years, quite rare for a country). Next we knew, iceland was on the same list as terrorist organizations like Al quaida and terrorist supporting nations. It has now come to light that before they did that, the assets of the banks would have sufficed to pay off the legal requirement and then some. But freezing everything and declaring us as a terrorist nation effectively took all value off those assets. Catch 22?.

We are now running down on foreign currency to buy in produce. We have been working with the IMF to get a loan to get the economy moving but word is that the english and dutch are working behind the scenes to deny us of that loan until we agree to pay way over the legal requirements. Gordon Brown is basically trying to look as some savior to the british people, he's been doing horrible in the polls and this is his Falklands war.

In essence, we got fucked by greedy businessmen and inept politicians. 99% of the nation had no idea we were written down as responsible for all these foreign accounts. The politicians championed these businessmenn while everything here was booming, they were buying up huge companies overseas, money here was very easy to come by. But as it turns out, it was a bubble, none of it was real.

In the last few decades unemployment has been from 1,2-2,2%. We are now facing a possible 10-20% next year. Numbers that have never been seen in the history of the country. Our international reputation has been terminally fucked. We read stories of icelanders in england having their dinner plates spat on, people getting verbally abused in the street e.t.c. Just for being icelandic. For the actions of about 30 people.

This rant could probably be 3x longer, but i'll stop here for now .