 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to Top 5 Friday. Today we are going to be talking about my Top 5 favorite non-horror novels. This was a request by Instagram user constant.reader1408. I'll leave a link to her down there in the doobly-doo. But it looks like her name is Ray Don, R-A-E, and in D-A-W-N with no space in the middle, but it's capital R and capital D. Thank you for the request, and let's go ahead and jump right into it. At the number 6 spot, I know it's Top 5 Friday, I have an honorable mention. I wanted to do only novels this time, so maybe I'll do novellas next time. But of mice and men, yes they call it a novel, but I mean it's only 105 pages. That's it. So I mean I can't really call it a novel, when it's probably something like 25-30 thousand words. So I'll call it a novella, but this is an honorable mention. I highly recommend, if you have not listened to the Gary Sinise narrated audio version, I highly recommend it. Everybody that I have recommended it to has thanked me for the recommendation. It is just that good. The story is perfect, in my opinion. It doesn't go on too long, the character development is on point, and the ending is perfect. So let's get into the actual Top 5. At number 5, I am going with The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I don't care much for YA. The only two young adult authors that I have ever enjoyed is John Green and Andrew Smith, the guy that wrote Winger, Standoff, Grasshopper, Jungle, 100 sideways miles, he did a bunch of stuff. I'll do a video on him at some point. It's probably when Grasshopper Jungle sequel comes out. But we're talking about John Green. I love this book. It is in my Top 20. It's easily made this list. The Top 5 here, all 5 of these were very easy to pick out, but this was one of the first ones that I picked out. But I'm putting it at number 5 because it's not even my normal genre. I don't care too much for YA, and I don't care too much for romance. This is a very weird romance, but it is very romance-y. The depth of emotion in here is far deeper, in my opinion, than anything else out there in YA that I have read. I know my wife loves Angie Thomas, the author of On The Come Up and Thug, or The Hate You Give. Either one of those. I have not read those, but I want to get to them. I'm almost wondering if I'll dislike it just because it's YA. Because she also loved, The Sun is also a star, I think it is, and I didn't like it. But this one is amazing. Very, very, very close call here because I almost put Looking For Alaska on this list, but I think this one has more emotional depth in it than Looking For Alaska. Next up, I do want to say something before we continue on. When I was asked to do this, the first thing that I've told myself is you can't have anything that can even be remotely considered horror on this list because for one you probably just start not argument down in the chat whether or not something is horror or not, if I come even close. So things like Night Film, You, Night Film by Marisha Pacell, and You by Caroline Kepnis, those books I have kind of left off, even Fashion Victim by Amina Akhtar and Erin Mintohals, Our Kind of Cruelty, even though those books are kind of horrifying, I didn't feel, even though those books are not labeled horror, they do have horrifying elements. So I mean, even Jesmin Ward's stuff, like Unburied Sing would probably have hit this list, that probably would have been my list, if there wasn't that aspect, you know, at the end there's like a horror aspect, I don't want to spoil it with what it is, but that's the thing that I was thinking about when I went into this. So if you're wondering where You and Night Film and those books are, I'm not putting those on there. Maybe I will do a list, if you guys want to see a list of books that I consider horror that aren't labeled horror, please let me know down there in the doobly-doo. Next up we have The Power of the Dog by Don Wilson. I have not read the last book, The Border, and I did not care for the cartel half as much as I love this one, probably because Colin didn't come back, that's a spoiler, I apologize, but this one I read, it is a, hang on here, it is a 537 page book and I read it in three days. The only other author I ever do that with is Stephen King. I will pick up his books and I will read it over a long weekend, five, six hundred pages, the first time I read it. This book is amazing. Don Wilson can write his ass off. The cartel probably would have been better for me had I known that Colin wasn't going to be in there. So it is a matter of my expectations, you know, screwing up a read and I will likely end up rereading the whole series before I get to the border. So I will likely reread this one and then I will reread the cartel going into the border and I'll probably enjoy it more. But this one, if you have not read Don Wilson, I, Winslow, I almost said Winslow, Don Wilson definitely go out and check out all of his stuff. I highly recommend starting with this one because that's where I started. So at the number three spot, not six, three, three, number three spot, we are going with Gone with the Wind. I have written and deleted my review for this book several times. The reason for that, this version is also falling apart. It is literally glued to, not glued, but it is taped together with clear tape. And I have another one that has the white, it's the exact same copy, but it doesn't have the painted pages. And I really, really like the painted pages. So I'm holding on this one, but I never really cared too much for the movie. The book I absolutely loved. I read it a chapter at a time, maybe it's two chapters. I think it was two chapters because it has 60 chapters, I believe. And I read it in a month of, yeah, it's 62 chapters and I read it in the month of December, which has 31 days, so two chapters a day. I was completely, completely just stuck in this world while the civil war was happening, all that stuff. Was it reconstruction? I cannot, I can never remember what it's called. But there's a lot of talk about how this book is pro slavery or pro the south during that time. I don't feel that way. If that was the author's intention, whatever. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect portrait of how ugly the southern United States is, especially during that time. And there's a little, there's, the book is shouldn't Freud for me. I hope I said that right. Watching all these bad things happen to these terrible fucking people. Scarlet and all that. To some extent, the one bad guy, I get ret, the one anti-hero, I don't know what you want to call him. He's the only one who really talks any sense in the book. And he's the only one who I felt wasn't racist for the, just because, he was only racist because the time frame was racist. Everybody else was just a terrible fucking person. And maybe not Ashley, but who's Ashley's wife or girlfriend or whoever it is. That lady, she was okay too. But everybody in this book, everybody in this book catches hell. Even Rhett to some extent, even though Rhett has the best and Rhett travels the world and you can see the culture in him. And I appreciated that because he was smart enough to go and visit other places and leave the south. Whereas you had all these other people stuck in the south, stuck in their ways. And I thought that metaphor, whether or not the author meant it or not. Another thing in here is, from what I understand from reading articles about this book, the Margaret Mitchell actually checked almanacs for the weather that happened, so that she even got the weather right on the days that she was writing about. That's some insane research. But moving on to number two, After Dark by Haruki Mirakami. This was my introduction to Haruki Mirakami and I absolutely fell in love with him. My buddy Gregor said, hey, well actually I asked him about one Q84, which is a 1200 page book. And he said, it probably start with something like After Dark, which is super short. And After Dark is I think 243 pages, 245 pages, something like that. It reads insanely quick. I read this in two sittings over the course of maybe three or four hours. And I'm not a fast reader. I'm not a speed reader. But the television segments were my favorite part. It was just so weird. And I love weird as long as weird is done well with some kind of meaning. If you're weird, it's just there to be weird. A friend told me he just got through reading a book, a horror novel, where there's a giant duck, well you don't know, but there's a giant duck with a giant penis comes and like rakes the dude to death at the end of the book. That kind of weird shit. I mean, if there's no point to it, then I don't care too much about it. The weird in Haruki Mirakami stuff is amazing. He does surrealist fiction, I think better than anybody else. He does magical realism terrifically. And he's easily one of my favorite authors. And this is one of my favorite non horror books. I don't think there's anything in here that can be confused with horror. Some of the best scenes in this book are just two people sitting in a diner talking. But my favorite scenes are the television scenes. And once you read the book, you'll understand what I'm talking about. And last, certainly not least, I almost didn't put this on the list and it ended up being at number one. So take that for what you will. There's a character in here that is absolutely horrifying and that's why I didn't want to put it on this list. But at the end of the day, it's my favorite non horror novel, even though there are aspects of it, and I know I'm breaking my own rules, but there are aspects of it that are absolutely terrifying. And that's One Fluid with a Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kessie. Nurse Ratchet is one of the best villains of all time. What she does to Murphy and what everything that happens with Chief and all that, this book is one of the only books that I have read more than five times other than Stephen King's It. I've read this probably 10 times at this point. It's super short, it's only 272 pages and it's a very small, even though it's kind of dense. But the level of emotion and the level of characterization, the character development in here is what I came to love. And the ending, like of mice and men, is absolutely perfect. Pitch, perfect. I don't think there is a single piece of this book that you could do away with without damaging the overall story. It is one of those perfect experiences for me and of course it's my number one. But if I had to choose, if I had to put of mice and men on this list of mice and men would likely be above this one just because of the succinct nature of it, just because there's no wasted word. And that's one of the things that Steinbeck was so good at. Kessie is great too, but there is something to be said about the power of brevity. And in of mice and men, I don't think that story could have been any shorter, any longer. In this one, I don't think it could have either, but it's less time consuming. If that makes sense, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. If you think I'm crazy, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. And also, let me know what your top five non-horror novels are of all time. Maybe top ten. Give me whatever. Give me however many you want to. If you want to put a hundred down there, that's your typing time you gotta take. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another Top Five Friday. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye!