From Wegglywoo:

1. Total number of books I’ve owned:

Well, it’s not that many. I’ve known people with enormous libraries - mine’s only a hundred books or so, but on the increase.

2) The last book I bought:

I have to divide books into ‘work’ and ‘fun’ categories. The last book was a work book called Deleuze: the Clamor of Being, by Alain Badiou. It’s a bit over my head, but I think Badiou is on the right track. The last fun book was Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. It was alright, nothing special.

3) The last book I read:

The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis. It’s a pretty good book. It’s funny to read the bits of dialogue that look genuine in the movie but in the book have one person lying to the other or just saying whatever the other person expects to hear.

4) 5 books that mean a lot to me:

Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot. I know T.S. Eliot isn’t very hip nowadays, but I’m an old-fashioned kinda guy. His sense of emptiness and disconnection is radical in its own quiet way. Prufrock is a big thing for me because it sets the intellectual standard for everything else. (I only just learned that he was American and a virgin until the age of 26. Odd.)

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. Girl finds boy dead on kitchen floor after gruesome suicide. Girl refuses to deal with it and goes to work. Later, girl goes on holiday. One of the strangest and most disturbing books I’ve ever read.

Human, All Too Human by Friedrich Nietzsche. All of Nietzsche’s books are good, except for The Antichrist. This one is very readable as well as being deceptively complex, and has great sections on women, science, art and morality.

The Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. This series was inestimably influential to me. Adams’ sense of humor, his imagination, his love of the random and the outrageous are somehow just perfect. I’ve always felt like Arthur Dent and I’ve always wanted to be Ford Prefect.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This was Lee’s only book. She said she didn’t have anything else to say after writing it, and it stands as a great testimony to the book and to the woman that this statement rings true. If everyone read To Kill a Mockingbird, the world would be a better place.

I only wish I’d put an Australian book in here. I’m sure there must be a good one out there somewhere.