W. Doug Bolden

Name...

Three Books That Marked Your Childhood

• Son of Interflux by Korman
  (probably the most "advanced" book I had read at the time--I was 11/12 when it came out--humorous and still think about it from time to time, though last time I tried reading it I emembered how simply written it was)
• The Big Book of Science (or something similar)
  (actually there were two books almost similar, some sort of cheap "dollar store" books about 30 pages each filled with facts, trivia, experiments, history and the like. I still have one of them in really beaten up condition, but reread them so much and so often that the other just collapsed around the 20th-30th pass-through. This is a major influence on my science love)
• Choose Your Own Adventures
  (n a lot of ways, inspired my gaming nature, but also really made me want to write and helped boost my imagination)

...And your Teenage years

• Lord of the Rings
  (actually somewhat disliked it when I first read it, just thumbed through most of it, but a few of the major themes stuck with me and I later went on to reread it and love it)
• Lord of the Flies
  (book about the breakdown of the male, adult mind when forced into isolation, pretending to be a story about a group of unwatched children embracing freedom...how could a mostly loner teenage male not love it?)
• Wizards RPG
  (though I had not seen the movie /The Wizards/ when I got the book, I was amazed by the things the game did to RPGs--I had only seen D&D prior. Not only did it make me love character driven RPGs a good deal--retained to this day--but it is the chief reason Istarted supporting the Indie movement as well as write my own)

The One Book that Has Changed You the Most

• Dune
  (simply put, this book helped me to think about interaction with people and philosophies and religions and history in a whole new way)

Your Three Favorite Books

• House of Leavesby MZD
  (while some of its formatting tricks are as much gimmick as anything, Danielewski manages to strongly convey a lot of the mental stress going on, plus add levels of metastory, but simple tricks like struck out red text representing the monsters we can't see, house being written in cold blue, text being turned upside down as character understanding becomes confused, the words crisscrossing in a way to form a maze as you hold them up to a light, and fonts whose name tells you the true meaning of the character who "speaks" in them, all add up to a story within a story within a story)
• Neverwhere by Gaiman
  (one of the best, most accessible entries into modern dark fantasy with a ton of puns, the most likable everyman since Arthur Dent, and a couple of badguys worth reading about)
• A Scanner Darkly by Dick
  (surreal study of power and control and loss of self, the "Ayn Rand" joke along makes it worthy of being on this list)

Another Three Books You Could Read Again and Again

• Night Shift by King
  (wide mix of horror short stories in a wider range of styles than most King books have. "Children of the Corn" for some days, "Jerusalem's Lot" for others)
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Adams
  (The later books sort of pull the whole "book" down, but the first three are classics that I still laugh outloud at the jokes just remembering them...and I simply cannot argue with the logic about what the babelfish has to say aboutthe existence of God)
• The Best of P.G. Wodehouse
  (This one is sort of a stand-in for the entire collection of Wodehouse, most of which amazingly rereadable--a good thing, since so much of it is sort of repetitive--but as a single book has a lot of the best lines...such as this one (paraphrased): Bachelor 1 - If you were to place all the women he's made a play for head to foot, I say they would circle the globe! Bachelor 2 - Well, a bit more than that, some of them were quite tall.)

Three Books You've Read Recently or Are Currently Reading

Note, since this obviously changes all of the time, I am going to leave it (for now) at the day that I posted the quiz: March 27, 2008.

• The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett
• Emerald Sea by John Ringo
• The History of the Paraodx by Roy Sorenson

Three Books You'll Read Soon

See the note to the above question/section.

• Lisey's Story by King.
• Invisible Monsters by Palahniuk.
• Mort by Prachett.

Finally, one Guilty Pleasure Read

• Pretty much anything by Richard Laymon