I saw this on fellow Brexile-in-Sweden Paul Graham Raven’s blog here, and since I haven’t been as productive here as I’d initially hoped… and I still need to start on my annual “best of the year” blog post…
So I’ll just jump in and do this thing. Which goes like this…
How many books do you own?
According to LibraryThing, where I’ve catalogued all my books, I own 4 075 books. I’m not convinced that’s especially accurate as I got rid of a lot of books when I left the UK and I didn’t have time to note down their titles. I’ve also lost books over the years, and I have some books here in Uppsala I’ve yet to put on LibraryThing. So, not all, then. The bulk of my books are still in storage, but here in Sweden I have 570 books, of which 365 are on my Kindle. Some of those are dupes I have in storage, others are omnibus editions (such as the entire Wheel of Time, or the Dune collection).
What was the last book you bought?
The last book I bought and which is in my possession is Neverness (1988, USA) by David Zindell, which I read back in the very early 1990s but wanted to read again. I also want to read more of his fiction. However, I recently ordered three novellas from the Black Friday sale on the NewCon website, by Ian Watson, Ken MacLeod and Keith Brooke. They have yet to arrive.
What was the last book you read?
I’m currently in the middle of The Ministry for the Future (2020, USA) by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s about the climate and how we’re all going to die. Cheery stuff. The last book I finished was The Telling (2000, USA) by Ursula K Le Guin, which was actually a reread (last read in 2006). I appreciated it more on this read, but it’s not one of Le Guin’s more memorable novels.
What are five books that mean a lot to you?
I’ve answered this question in various forms over the years, and my choices rarely change.
Dhalgren (1975, USA) by Samuel R Delany is probably the book I’ve read the most times, and I reread it every decade or so. Sprawling, confusing, but powerful, with some imagery I have always found it hard to shake.
Ascent (2007, UK) by Jed Mercurio — yes, that Jed Mercurio, the Line of Duty Jed Mercurio — inspired me to write science fiction in a style which eventually led to the Apollo Quartet.
The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960, UK) by Lawrence Durrell turned me into a book collector. I fell in love with the four books, started collecting Durrell’s other books, first in paperback, then in first edition, then in signed first edition, then the signed limited edition chapbooks... It got a little out of hand, to be honest.
Kairos (1988, UK) by Gwyneth Jones persuaded me to make the effort to track down copies of her hard-to-find early juvenile novels from the 1970s (published under the name Gwyneth A Jones). She was the first author I did that for. It’s sort of an early taste of the book-collecting bug. I did eventually find copies… but I mentioned to Jones I’d been looking for them, so she sent me signed copies. This was back in the early 1990s. I still have two copies of each book.
Starman Jones (1953, USA) by Robert A Heinlein was the first category science fiction novel I remember reading. It was 1976, and a conversation in the classroom prompted a classmate to lend me a copy of this book. It was the NEL paperback published that year. I remember it well. From there, another school-friend introduced me to Isaac Asimov and EE ‘Doc’ Smith, neither of which are authors I esteem these days. In hindsight, the paperbacks I read back then all had Chris Foss covers… Within a year or two, I was reading science fiction pretty much exclusively, and my preferred writers were Clifford D Simak, James Blish and AE Van Vogt. My taste in books has changed a great deal since then, although I’ve recently been inspired to explore those books by Heinlein I didn’t read back in the 1980s.
Given the impending death of Twitter, thanks to Dunning-Kruger-Musk, and the lack of any real substitute, and the way Facebook has become little more than yet another advertising channel… it seems blogs may be coming back again. If so, I hope the various blogging platforms rethink the many “improvements” they’ve implemented over the past few years. We want a platform that’s good for us, that we can use, not one that privileges your advertisers. Because more of us means more advertisers; the reverse doesn’t hold true. The aforementioned apartheid brainiac has demonstrated as much.
