Bookie book bookeroo!

John did it to me again!

This time, the game is:

How many books do you own?
Ugh, too many, yet not quite enough. It probably numbers around 100 books, but I don't know where most of them have gotten to, having lent out so many. A lot of those are graphic novels. And yes, they do count, you snobby bookist literature-lover, so don't knock 'em til you've tried 'em.

Most recent book I bought:
Neverwhere, Stardust, and American Gods, all by Neil Gaiman. I thought, y'know, it's time I owned those books, so I traded in a bunch of duds for used copies I found at Willow Books, this great new/used bookstore that just opened up on Bathurst near Bloor. Tell your friends!

Most recent book read:
I'm currently reading a crappy book based on a video game I really enjoyed - Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. It was an old Sierra video game that I finished playing a while back, and it's totally awesome as a game, but the translation in the book is horrible. Not to disparage Jane Jensen's writing abilities - she's a good writer, but I guess since I already know exactly what's going to happen, it's not a terribly scintillating gothic horror murder-mystery.

Five books that mean a lot to me:
1) Kingdom Come - yeah, it's a graphic novel, but this is the story that ruined me for comic books. The Alex Ross is God.
2) Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) - this is an awesome young adult series by an extrodinarily gifted author about oh-so-many things. Mainly, it's based on Milton's Paradise Lost, and talks about a war between the Kingdom of Heaven and Earth. Brilliant, and hardly for kids. Suck on that, Judy Blume.
3) The Chronicles of Narnia - another great children's classic. I just realized that even with all the Christian symbolism in the last three books I've mentioned, it's a wonder I haven't been converted.
4) 1984 - Orwell's dystopia, the Ministry of Truth, double-plus ungood... how can you not love it?
5) Atlas Shrugged - I read this while I was in Hong Kong for a month in 2000. Ayn Rand was almost as crazy a right-wing nut-job as Ann Coulter is, but at least she wrote decent books and was educated.

Now I infect The Red Fork and Flocons de Mais.