Java 7 has now made it easier to do what I wrote here, longer ago now than I care to remember. You can get a Collection of String from a file pretty easily. The source code can be downloaded HERE. Of course, if you're still using < Java 7, you can use the earlier code.

import java.io.IOException;

import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.nio.file.FileSystem;
import java.nio.file.FileSystems;
import java.nio.file.Files;

import java.util.List;


public class StringListDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            List<String> strings = Files.readAllLines(FileSystems.getDefault()
                                                                 .getPath("strings.txt"),
                    Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
            System.out.println(strings);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}