Guess I might as well...

Due to the storms last night they've closed my office until noon, so I guess I might as well write about books. Here goes:

Number of Books I Own: REW covered the number pretty well, but she didn't say anything about the content. I'd guess they're roughly evenly split between fiction and non-fiction. REW's books, as you might have guessed, include a lot of religion and women's studies books. Mine are mostly Harlequin romance novels and Scientology pamphlets.

Last Book I Bought: Well, that's a little tricky because of Amazon and their unfathomable shipping/charging policies. The last book that came was Aquariums of Pyongyang which I picked up on Cleversponge's recommendation. Haven't started it yet, though.

Last Book I Read: I'm about 40 pages from the end of Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I'll finish it before DL tonight. Does that count? It's a very good and imaginative novel. The major flaw being that it's pretty uneven. The story is told by a number of different characters and he definitely pulls off some of the voices better than others. The blending of tropes from Sci-Fi and Fantasy is interesting and is actually working better than expected. Can't give too complete of a review just yet because I'm just a few pages before the big reveal...

Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

1. Mythology by Edith Hamilton. I'll let this stand for the entire canon of Greek/Roman and Norse mythology that I adored as a child. An adoration that probably led to...

2. The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook Does this count? Sure, it's a book, and it had a very large impact on my life. I don't get to play much anymore, but it was playing D&D which helped lead me to an interest in history and a love of literature, not to mention a life-long fear of girls.

3. At The Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft. Another "formative years" bit of reading. Lead me to an interest in Sci-Fi, horror and purple prose. Another favorite was the Randolph Carter cycle of "dream" stories (Dream Quest of Unknown Kaddath, The Silver Key, Through the Gates of the Silver Key)

4. Neuromancer by William Gibson. Some guys carry around copies of On the Road, this fulfilled the same function for me. It was an introduction of sorts to "adult" Sci-Fi (read "well-written and acutally thought provoking") after reading huge numbers of mass produced genre books.

But these are all books I read before I was a teenager, so what's something more recent? How about...

5. The Downing Street Memo by Mathew Rycroft. Seriously, why isn't this a bigger issue?

Okay, that's all. I'm not passing this on to anybody, because, well, I don't know 5 people on-line who haven't already responded. If you need to know why, go back and look at #2 above. [cough] geek [cough]