From Allen:
Number of Books I Own
Hmmm… not sure, somewhere in the 100s (not including comics) I guess, our sitting room shelves are about 6ft long and there’s 5 of them if my memory serves me correctly so I suppose I have a total of 30ft of books. Average width… 3/4 inch so somewhere around 540, nah that sound like way too many, maybe there are only 4 shelves, so nearer 400 books, still seems like an awful lot , though I suppose some of those are Emmas…

Last Book I Bought
Mother London by Michael Moorcock, not finished it yet as I started cycling in again and the bus is my time for fiction. I was really enjoying it though and will probably take it up again in France this summer.

Last Book Read
Colapse by Jared Diamond, as with its predecessor Guns, Germs and Steel Mr Diamond packs some serious research into this book and the often dire conclusions he reaches seem pretty inescapable. Unfortunately the detail level smothers the pace and about halfway through, though i was gripped, I found myself skipping sections where the archaeological finds were catalogued in rather too much detail. Still I’d recomend it, particularly the 2 sections on Polynesian societies.

Five Books That Meant A Lot To Me
Galapogas by Kurt Vonnegut. I just love all Vonneguts books and keep on meaning to write him a letter to say thankyou for all the entertainment I’ve got from them over the years, for the ecological /apocalyptic themes this is my favourite. Really though, you can only fully appreciate KV if you read all his stuff as a kind of single piece, a development of a very personal humanist philosphy.

Halo Jones. Much of Alan Moores later stuff (esp. Watchmen and From Hell) is undoubtedly better than this, but this is about stuff that meant a lot to me right? I read book 3 of Halo Jones in 2000AD when it was first published in 1986 (I was 9 fact fans) and I didn’t really get it, but something about it stuck in my mind and years later, after I arrived back in England, I managed to get hold of the the whole saga reprinted in 2000AD monthly, by this time I was about 14. Anyway, it totally blew me away, when he wrote this Moore was already begining to experiment with the multilayerd story telling and use of visual metaphores that he was later to deploy to such great effect in Watchmen (in this case it’s halos, hoops space stations and orbits acting as a series of concentric prisons in which Jones finds herself trapped) but most importantly, and most unusually for a comic, you actually believe in and really care about the characters, on top of that they’re all women. I blame this series for causing me to buy 400 odd issues of 2000AD instead of going outside and getting a sun tan.

The Unlimited Dream Company by JG Ballard. Visionary and intense, I just love the idea of London’s suburbs being overrun by rainforest.

Taronga by Victor Kelleher. For some reason you don’t seem to be able to get this book in the UK, all my friends in PNG read it and loved it. Probably single handedly responsible for my interest in ecology, the end of the world and science-fiction literature.

OK, one more… maybe short stories, neither Ficciones or the complete JG Ballard Short Stories are ever far from my bedside table (often under a pile of clothes), or maybe Hitch Hickers Guide To The Galaxy… nah, what about Kernighan and Ritchie’sThe C Programing Language, not exactly great literature but utterly indispensable during the 3 years I spent struggling against pointers and the other unreconstructed horrors of ANSI C. Or some other comics maybe? What about Head On, Hate, I dunno, it’s a big tie for the 5th position

Passing this on to
Neil, Nick, Scott, Dan