Did not know about this author. Thanks for introducing him to me.
I don't think i have a REAL favorite book. In grad school i had to read more than i had ever done in 23 years to catch up with American students. That made me read a lot and fast of a great variety of canonical writers (both American and British), but i could not develop an absolute affinity with one in particular, let alone with one single book.
There are books i cannot forget (One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Gracia Marquez) and books that i love to teach for particular academic purposes (The Giver, by Lois Lowry; Old Man and the Sea, by Hemingway) and books that have fascinated me and that i hope to be able to re-read many times (Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder).
Murakami sounds interesting. That opening quote speaks to me in very intimate way. I'll definitely check him out.
I love this piece of wisdom:

The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.

I remember once at a bar in Athens, Oh. (i had been in the State for about a week) a friend of mine from Venezuela, who was finishing his PhD in Math and who learned some basic English before he went to Grad School (in his 40s), saved me from some embarrassment with a guy who was really drunk and thought that Colombia and Venezuela was the same thing and coming from either country meant you carried drugs with you. I could not understand much of what the guy was saying (and i had been an English teacher for 4 years).
This friend of mine told me he learned all his English in bars; streets smarts, he said, that's what you need.