10:50am on Saturday, just woke up from the longest sleep I've had in two weeks, and I walk out into my front room. I like the way the inset bookshelves along the east wall are filled to the brim on one side by Greg's extensive movie collection, even if I never have any desire to watch "Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Hockey" or the third season of "Friends" (to be fair that one belongs to his girlfriend), and on the other side by my personal choices of the "best of the best" of my library. Clearly the shelf isn't close to being big enough to house every book I own, but there's enough space for a few dozen, so I picked carefully.

Don't get the wrong idea -- I'm not a character from a Martin Amis novel who has to carefully consider what he displays in his lodgings out of a desire to subliminally charm and woo women. Other than Greg's girlfriend and my sister, women don't come to this house all too often. No, I made the decisions I did because I sit in this front room a lot, maybe more than I sit in my room, because lately I've taken a liking to sunlight and open windows, and trying to organize that in my room is a logistical nightmare due to the placing of my furniture. So I sit out here, on our glorious couches, and I like to let my eyes wander over the titles and remember what I was doing when I first read this or that book; why I bought it; who gave it to me or suggested the author. If I come across something out of place, something I don't read anymore or am embarrassed to ever have owned, it interrupts my reverie, kills my buzz as it were. So I'm meticulous.

Four prevalent themes stand out: music, philosophy, science fiction and classical literature. The Victorian-era classics I'll admit I mostly ignore -- reading Anthony Trollope or the Bronte sisters once is kind of enough for me. I don't deny their talent with words, and I do enjoy some of their works, but generally speaking I simply can't identify with their characters. They're either desperately poor beggars and street urchins, or else they're fabulously wealthy and live in cottages in the countryside and their time is spent determining suitable husbands and wives for one another's children. That's not a narrative conflict, that's a tea party in the Hamptons. Sorry, not for me. Highlighted memory: reading Robert Johnson while lying on a couch at my place at Yonge and Sheppard with last night's rum still running strong through my veins, desperately trying to prepare myself for an examination in a class I'd attended maybe a half-dozen times throughout the year. Everytime I fell asleep I dreamed I was Robinson Crusoe, stuck on an island entirely populated by U of T graduate students. It was the most horrible dream I've ever had.

The rest of the classic stuff is historically important, so I include it. I've got everything from Alghieri's Divine Comedy to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and I've read all of them at least once (except for the aforementioned War and Peace which I'm still trying to get through after ten years of chipping away at it). Mark Twain might be one of my favourite writers ever -- I need to buy more of his stuff, because at the moment I've only got his seminal works. Man, what a smart guy. There's a cat who knew the beauty in simplicity, in honesty, in telling a true story (even if it wasn't true). But I digress. Highlighted memory: I was first introduced to Dante Alghieri by an old friend of mine who fancied himself a poet, and once upon a time he was one. We were standing in Chapters in Newmarket and he asked if I'd ever read Inferno. When I said no, he immediately bought me the entire set. I read it in a week and it changed the way I thought about narrative poetry forever, and would later help to inspire my stage play.

The philosophy stuff is where people start accusing me of doing the Charles Highway "literature-makes-me-look-cool" trip. But the fact of the matter is, to be frank, I took as many philosophy courses in university that my degree requirements would allow. I know on some level it's all bullshit, because it's all a circular argument with no answer, but the hell with it -- I'm foremost a rhetoretician, so bullshit is more or less what I do, and I have nothing but the greatest respect for writers who can twist the words of an opponent's argument to suit their own purposes. Also, some of these guys had really interesting ideas about the world and the existential questions that preoccupy me most days. Kierkegaard's knights of infinite resignation and of faith spring to mind; the idea that you must believe beyond your capacity to believe in something in order for it to be true or virtuous; Kant suggests something similar in his theories on morality. One of my favourite thinkers is still Friedrich Nietzsche, because he made one of the simplest, most beautiful statements regarding his own writing I've ever seen of a writer: "Vademectum, vadetectum." From The Gay Science, it's Latin. Translation: "Follow me, follow yourself." He wasn't taking credit for his ideas; he was acknowledging them as universal truths to be discovered by everyone. That is at once the most humble and most arrogant assertion I can imagine, and I love that crazy old eugenecist for it. Highlighted memory: Christmas, 1998, we were having a friendly get-together at Kym's parents' house, and in the interest of fairness and frugality Kym instituted a Secret Santa policy. My "secret" benefactor was another old writer friend who kindly thought to get me a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I was fourteen that year, and the first time I read it all the way through it blew my mind and changed the way I looked at life. I read it for a second time ten years later, and it blew my mind again.

Ah, science fiction, perhaps my oldest literary friend. As a child I had my head crammed in books all the time, and because my public, social life was so stilted and misformed, I sank further and further into fantasy worlds, usually built in this or that imagined futuristic universe. My favourite was the galaxy as it was envisioned by Gene Roddenberry in Star Trek, but as I grew older my tastes in science fiction grew far past that single imagining and embraced other, more complex takes on humanity's progress. My current bookshelf is stocked with the three heavywights of "hard" science fiction -- Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. This is not Star Trek or Star Wars folks, this is serious science fiction -- take Asimov's Foundation series, which deals with the concept of psychohistorics, in which prevailing social trends viewed over a period of time and as though they were the expressions of a single organism, can be used to predict upcoming prevailing social trends or macrocosmic actions -- in essence, a scientifically-provable way to tell the future. Heady stuff, man, and not for the Luke Skywalker or Captain Kirk circuit (though I'm not knocking either of those immortal characters). Sci-fi isn't really in my lexicon anymore these days as I focus more and more on existential prose and music, but I still like to go back and read Childhood's End or Starship Troopers now and again. Highlighted memory: my dad introduced me to Clarke when he got tired of hearing me drone on about this week's episode of The Next Generation. I read Childhood's End for the first time when I was still a little too young to understand the implications of what Clarke was trying to say with his story, but it hit me years later when I realized just how much modern science fiction has aped off his ideas.

I know I make a big deal out of music -- and it is a big deal, don't get me wrong, maybe the biggest deal in my whole life. I love music; I love to perform, and the more I do, the happier I am. But at the end of the day, when everyone has gone to bed and the guitar gets put back on its stand, I will go back to my inset bookshelf and visit with the friends who have been with me since I was old enough to delve into their world. I'm a writer, first and foremost, and writers will always be the artists to whom I feel closest. I'll never read everything I want to read in this life -- human history has advanced to the point where I could read eighteen hours a day, every day for the rest of my life, to the exclusion of all else, and not even scratch the surface of what's been recorded by people in history and what continues to be recorded to this day, and sometimes that bothers me. But at least I can pull any book off any shelf every day for the rest of my life, and bask in the words for a little while. It's the words that matter, you know. It's always been the words that matter.

Thanks for reading, as always.