Tagged to talk about books

My friend Mark Leslie tagged me in his blog to talk about books, so here goes:

Total number of books I've owned:

A trickier question than it might seem. I've divested myself of a lot of books over the years, and besides all the ones in my bookcases I still have many hundreds in unopened boxes from when I last moved, five years ago. But the number 2,000 sounds about right to me ...

The last book I bought:

A trade paperback of Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, to replace my old mass-market paperback that's in one of the boxes mentioned above; I needed the book as a prop for my appearance on TVOntario's More 2 Life discussed below. (Incidentally, I also watched the 1976 Helter Skelter miniseries for the third time this week; much of the acting in it is astonishingly good -- way better than typical Seventies television -- and it has Alan Oppenheimer in it, whom I'll watch in anything.)

The last book I read:

Believe it or not, The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke, which I had never read before. Delightful. It was Clarke's first full-length novel, and it was fascinating to see the seeds for things he did later in it: the plots of 2010 and A Fall of Moondust are both presaged here.

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Oooh! Let me do six:

• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee -- my favorite novel.
  
• Trouble on Titan by Alan E. Nourse -- the first adult science-fiction novel I ever read, and the one that (in a positive way) made me decide I wanted to be a science-fiction writer.
  
• The Man of Property by John Gallsworthy -- first volume of "The Forsyte Saga," which I absolutely adore.
  
• Gateway by Frederik Pohl -- for my money, the best science-fiction novel ever written.
  
• The Enormous Egg by Oliver P. Butterworth -- a kid's book that I can still read with pure joy as an adult; it's the totally charming story of a young boy whose hen lays an egg out of which hatches a Triceratops ...
  
• The Paper Chase by John Jay Osborn, Jr. -- I read this in my last year of high school, and it made my change my career path: I decided to pursue writing instead of academia because of it.
  

The books in my collection where the physical object means a lot to me:

• An ancient, beat-up paperback of From Outer Space, a variant title for Hal Clement's Needle, signed by Hal the first time I met him; Hal and I went on to become friends, and I miss him a lot.
  
• A copy of Dune, inscribed to me by one of my high-school girlfriends, 'cause what she wrote was so sweet ... (and, just to underscore how long ago high school was, I had her adult son as one of my writing students at the University of Toronto last summer ...).