BOOKS. YOU'VE GOT TO LOVE BOOKS.

There's a blog chain going around, and it was kind of interesting, so I decided to do my thing too.

1: THE NUMBER OF BOOKS I OWN.

I have no idea. I've been buying books since I was in the third grade, and have parted company with very few in the years since then. Thousands, with no idea of how many. I mean, I've cateloged about a third of my comics, and those number over 3,000 (the third that is). It would be scary to contemplate trying to count the books. Some have been in boxes ever since I moved to LA from Austin. I live with books. I sleep with books. They're stacked all over the place.

2: THE LAST BOOK I BOUGHT.

That would be THE HOLLYWOOD STANDARD, by Christopher Riley. First off, he's a friend, so of course I'd get a copy in support of a friend. But beyond that, the book is about the actual standard format for shooting scripts in Hollywood. Chris worked for Warners in their script department for many years, and learned this from the typists (yeah, the people who actually had to retype scripts on TYPEWRITERS!). Very concise and clear about how things should look on a script page, and why (always an important thing, the why). I highly recommend it to anyone interested in any serious fashion about screenwriting.

3: THE LAST BOOK I READ.

Just finished reading it, in fact. Connie Willis' PASSAGE. I loved it. She's a wonderful writer, building up the layers of the story very carefully. You sometimes wonder why she takes so much time carefully putting in the details she does. But when you get to the climax of the story, it all comes together beautifully. And powerfully. I was definitely dealing with the tears sliding down my face as I read the last part. Highly recommend it as well.

4: FIVE BOOKS THAT MEAN A LOT TO ME.

This is where it gets sticky. I've noticed that others who answer this end up including "collected works" type volumes. It's inevitable, I suppose.

So.....
a: THE LORD OF THE RINGS. No matter how many times I reread this, I always find something that gives me pleasure. The first year of my encounters with it, I read it three times. And read it three times a year for the next couple of years at least. I don't read it quite as often these days. After all, there is something called over-doing it.

b: THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES. My father bought me this volume when I was in fourth/fifth grade. I'd just discovered Holmes on my own. (I bought a copy of HIS LAST BOW, which is the last Holmes book. It was my first encounter with Holmes.) And I was hooked. And dissatisfied with the ABRIDGED (for children) ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES -- I wanted the real stuff. So he got me this omnibus volume. All of it, all in one place. I loved it. Holmes had a profound effect on my developing psyche. His rational approach to things appealed greatly to my literalist mind. That and the wonders of the Powers of Observation. I thought it was the coolest thing possible.

c: THE COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE. Yeah, okay, so I still have my college textbook with all the annotations. But I've always loved Shakespeare since.... hmmm... probably the same period when I met Holmes. But not with as distinctive an event. I love the way Shakespeare plays with language. And I love the plays. HAMLET is my favorite, with MACBETH not far behind.

d: THE MIND OF THE MAKER, by Dorothy L. Sayers. On the one hand, it's one of the best explanations of what the Holy Trinity is that I've encountered. Why God is Three and yet One. But it is also about the creative process. She discusses aspects of creativity that can help explain why some art (be it visual or written, or even, I suppose, musical) fails. It's not a perfect book, I suppose. But it is a very good one, that challenges me about the responsibilities of the artist - toward the craft, toward the object created, toward the audience, and in the end, toward God. I'm in the process of rereading it at present, taking my time, mulling over chapters as I go.

e: ALL HALLOW'S EVE, by Charles Williams. This was the first of Williams' novels that I read, and it has remained my favorite. Perhaps because I'm a visual artist as much as a writer, and one of the principal characters in the novel is a painter. Williams described just exactly the sort of things I felt about my visual art, how I "entered into" it, how I wanted others to see it. But on top of that, Williams described the spiritual dimension of life in a way that felt quite familiar to me. He put a description to things I had felt and experienced, that our material world is overlaid with a spiritual world that is outside time. It was what I walked with every day, and this was pretty much the first (and almost only) novel that ever captured it for me. But Williams isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you can get into him, it's wonderful. If not, it will probably just seem dense and thick in language.

So, there you are. A peek into my world of books. And that's barely scraping the surface.