MERYL YOURISH HAS TAGGED ME WITH THE BOOK MEME. I don’t usually do these kinds of things, but what the hell.

1. Number of books you own: Jeez, I dunno. A couple of thousand? I recently unloaded a lot, but I still have walls of books in several rooms.

2. Last book I bought: I think it was Eric Flint’s Andrew Jackson alternative history (I’m about 2/3 through it now) but it may have been Richard Morgan’s Market Forces.

Last book I read: I think it was Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab. But it might have been Joel Garreau’s Radical Evolution.

Five books that mean a lot to me: The Lord of the Rings, Huckleberry Finn, Charles Black’s The Waking Passenger, Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, and Photography, by Phil Davis.

For me, though, it’s as much about authors as books. I was influenced a lot by Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, and Isaac Asimov, but more by their entire body of works than by any particular book.