But just for Sin‘s sake I’ll do it.

Number of books I own: Definitely in the hundreds, and if you count the books at my parents’ house that I lay claim too, perhaps a thousand. Though I don’t really think that you can count each individual Choose Your Own Adventure as its own book.

Last Book Bought: The Scar, by China Miéville. So far so good, but I’ve only really had time to read it on the bus.

Last book read: A Miracle of Rare Design, by Mike Resnick. This one was lent to me and I didn’t like it. It’s a sci-fi musing about a writer who is surgically altered to go undercover among all sorts of alien societies. It combines the anthropological sophistication of a bad Star Trek episode with profundity-via-inexplicable actions.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

• The Phantom Tollbooth — this is a classic and should be read by all children and adults. You’ll never look a boredom in the same way again.
• if on a winter’s night a traveler — I first got this book because Pari Zutshi saw it in one of the used bookstores in Champaign-Urbana (I want to say Jane Addams, but I honestly can’t remember) and she insisted that I buy it. Later she claimed that it was hers, at which point I surrendered it — a bad move on my part.
• The Good Person of Sezuan — The first really political play I had really done, this gave me a concrete example of how the theater can engage the audience on a political and intellectual level beyond word games.
• Theater of the Oppressed — Probably the first book that asked me to look critically at playmaking and to question the whole endeavor of the theater from the script to the presentation.
• One, two, three, infinity — George Gamow is cool.

No more memes though. Really.