considering myself tagged by @coruscanttojerusalem

you have just met a new person. they seem very cool. you hope they also think you are cool. they ask what your five favorite books are. which books do you say to sum up your coolness and subtextually beg them to be friends?

The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

Beowulf by the Beowulf poet

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot

Thud! by Terry Pratchett (although depending on the day, there is a good chance this changes to Night Watch or Witches Abroad or a different one. But there would be a Discworld Book)

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud 

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

**The trick is I am pretending I am too cool for rules, but really this is masking an inability to pick between favorites**

(In my attempt to not exceed the bounds of the prompt by too much I am giving honorable mentions in the footnotes to the following books that profoundly shaped my mental landscape: 

District Circle by Seamus Heaney (There should be something Irish on my list, and of the things on my shelves in that category, this is my comfort read and cool in a snobby English department way. But it was swapped with Clarke at the last moment when I realized there were no women authors on the list (oops), unless most profiles of the Beowulf poet are very, very off),  

A Batman comic (cut cause I had more trouble coming up with a short list than with the Pratchett book)

G. K. Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday 

Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (both cut just because the list was too long) 

Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere (cut do the revelation Gaiman is a creep).