give me adventure, or give me ice-cream

Choosing five of my most favorite books of all time is, simply put, an annoyance to me.  Perhaps, "five favorite books I can remember off the top of my head", or "five books that are my favorite...ish".  To spend the millions of hours in calculating which ones are my favorite and which ones justly do not make the cut, well, would drive me insane.  I would quite honestly have to read all the books of the world to make that kind of calibrated decision! And so, squandered into the deed of choosing the five favorites, I have silenced the control freak inside, and made my list.

        Haunted, By Chuck Palahniuk
    The Witches, by Roald Dahl 
   Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs 
Dune, by Frank Herbert
   Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

As most of our tastes are, we tend to get wary of vanilla after a while and venture further into the ice-cream shoppe.  Not saying that vanilla is a delightful treat, or what ultimately defines the vanilla novel, but to get down to the point, we all want completely different stories after a while.  Coconut  Banana Creme Boot ice-cream.  Whatever that tastes like.  I enjoy finding out.
Now, do not get me started on all the different novels I had to go through and tell them, (tears in eyes and a red nose), that they had to go back on my shelf, and wallow in their dusty sadness for a little while longer.   I noticed, however, as they were hopping away on their bindings, that all of them had one thing in common: adventure.  Fun, dark, gritty, whimsical, romantic, bloody adventure.  I enjoy love, but I do not mind the twisted.  Haunted and Brave New World make the cut on spell-binding and/or grotesque.  Dune is a classical fantasy adventure, while The Witches tells a tale of a little boy who notices witches (demons in human form) and simultaneously avoids and conquers them in the end (spoiler? eh.) Moon Called would be one of my guilty pleasures on this list, since it is the first of a series, and introduces a single, strong, woman/shape-shifter surrounded by werewolf dominants and the hidden world of magic in the state of Washington.  She goes on many adventures, and has the snarky, sarcastic, smooth attitude I love in a female character.  
 Most of these novels have almost nothing in common, besides the fact that four of the five could never happen in reality, since they fall into the category of magic, fantasy, and lore.  The novel titled Haunted, is about a writer's retreat gone wrong.  Which could happen theoretically...however, I doubt very much in the way Palahniuk had processed on those pages.  I enjoy main characters that are odd, do not fit in, or have some special attribute about them that make them stand out in their world.  The lack of realness in each of these stories is what drew me in.  I like to believe in the fantasy.  I like to seek out the magic.  I like to imagine ALL the possibilities.