01. Total number of books owned: Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. I’m totally crap at estimation, but I did a rough count once. Since then I’ve gotten rid of a ton of books, got a ton more and have put roughly half of my collection in storage. Plus I acquire an average of 2-5 books a week. “A couple thousand” seems about right.

02. The last book(s) I bought: Here’s a few of the newer arrivals.

- Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever - Peter Cowie
- Death Note #8 - Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata
- This Will All End in Tears - Joe Ollman
- Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores - edited by Greg Ketter

03. The last book I read: I re-read Zelazny’s Amber Chonicles, Volume I (i.e. Books 1-5) for the umpteenth time. Haven’t done that in the last year and a bit, but it was worth going back again–a familiar ray of sunshine in an otherwise wet and murky season.

04. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Plenty. Pick a medium and genre and I might be able to be more specific.

05. What are you currently reading? Bernard Cornwell’s trilogy about the Viking/Saxon wars in early Britain (The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North). I’d read The Last Kingdom before, but I wanted to wait until all three were out before I kept going. Of course, by that point I’d forgotten what had happened in the first one, so now I’m going through all of them again. (The Last Kingdom’s worth the re-read–I’m picking up tons of stuff I missed the first time around.) I was gonna settle down to plough through Death Note #8 a couple of days ago, but it’s clear from reading the first few pages that too much time has passed since I read the last one (how familiar). I’m probably going to have to start all the way at the beginning again, which I may or may not do in the near future.

06. Six books that mean a lot to me (and why): I’m going to try to keep this short, ’cause when I tried to tackle this one the first time around I was ending up with six short essays. No joke. So I’m gonna do this in under twenty words instead. Brevity is GO!

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin: The best fiction series I’ve ever read. Gripping, historical, nail-biting stories of the deepest realism and highest calibre.
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson: The novel cyberpunk wanted to be (and a piss-take of the genre) and the story The Matrix should have been.
Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut: - You know that novel you find in your teens that completely fucks over the way you see the world? Yeah.
Amber Volume I - Roger Zelazny: - The ultimate blending of fantasy, Machiavellian family relations and philosophy with swashbuckling and science-fiction thrown in for good measure.
Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: - For years I called it “the best book I’ve ever read”. It’s certainly the best superhero story ever written.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams: - I attribute most of my sense of humour to two things: Monty Python and H2G2. But I like H2G2 more.

07. Favorite short story authors:

- Harlan Ellison: Ellison was probably the first author I ever really started collecting. I started picking up his books when I was 14 or 15, almost always in used bookstores, almost always for $5 or less. Nearly two decades on, I’ve succeeded in rounding up about 35 of his books or, to put it another way, under half of what he’s published. He is one of the authors who, pretty much every time I sit down with his books, makes me go, “Why the fuck am I writing?! I will never be this good!” Then I redouble my efforts.
- H.P. Lovecraft: The first tattoo I got was a Lovecraftian design. It’s really hard to get much creepier than he managed in stories like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. The various masters of horror fiction pay homage to him for good reason.
- T.C. Boyle: Not only is his prose effortless and elegant, he manages to jump from genre to genre and tone to tone completely effortlessly. His novels are well-constructed, yes, but in his short fiction he constructs minature origami masterpieces with the English language.

08. Books I don’t like: Craftless fiction. I can read a bad non-fiction book and still glean some knowledge, but reading artless fiction generally fills me with a white hot rage (even while acknowledging I can take away a better sense of how not to do things). I don’t have any examples off the top of my head. Danielle Steele, maybe? Harlequin Romances? Mack Bolan novels? Things you usually find on truck stop spinner racks.

09. Which book, out of the millions ever published, do you most wish never to read again? The Tommyknockers (which I read when it first arrived in paperback, sometime around 1988 or so) was the only book I’ve ever forced myself to finish and the end of a love affair with Stephen King’s writing that lasted me from about Grade 7 to Grade 10. Now I just stop reading when I lose that much interest with a book, but then I had to see if there was some grand plan at the finale. There wasn’t, and upon completion it became clear to me that he really doesn’t know how to end his books. I still have respect for Steve as a storyteller, but I think a little advance plotting would go a long way for his novels.

10. What’s on your book/reading wish list? If I’m to interpret this question as “What books do you desperately want to get next?” as opposed to “What books are kicking around the house in piles that you should get around to reading soon?” then the list would probably be:

- Manna From Heaven - Roger Zelazny
- Lulu on Hollywood - Louise Brooks
- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks
- Untitled Film Stills - Cindy Sherman
- Off the Books : The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor - Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

I also have a paperback reading copy of Martin’s A Feast For Crows wending its way to me, and I’m rather curious about The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.

11. What genre are most of your books? If I was going to cut my entire collection apart with broad strokes, I suppose I’d have to say the two most prevalent categories are probably graphic novels (which are overflowing their alotted bookshelf) and non-fiction. But I could subdivide those categories (manga, DC/Vertigo, Tintin; piracy, Vikings, Victoriana, Canadiana) again and again. My fiction collection could probably be summed up as “g33ky with nerdy leanings” and I’d be okay with that.

12. Can we see your bookshelves? Here’s how I had part of one of my bookshelves set up in my last house. I’ve switched things around a bit, but I still own all the books and it’s pretty representative of my collection in general. (Click through to an enlargement.)