On your nightstand now:
I've almost finished Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. It's an account of the Coalition Provisional Authority's attempts to reconstruct Iraq right after the war. It's like reading about a guy falling on his face 450 times; a real-life sequel to Joseph Heller's Catch-22. And it's eye-opening. Prior to reading this I did not know that Halliburton rounded up and killed cats that were in the Green Zone. Who runs that company, Darth Vader?
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I studied the runes in the illustrations so that I could write swears in Dwarven language. I was lonely a lot.
Your top five authors:
Douglas Adams because Hitchhiker's Guide was right up my alley both in humor and style, and he was net-savvy quite early. Robert Hughes because Fatal Shore painted such a detailed picture of Australia's founding that I felt like I'd been there and his Culture of Complaint helped de-program me after college. P.J. O'Rourke for sharing my love of sarcasm, cynicism and politics. Primo Levi for his vivid, Mel Gibson-defying, memoirs and touching analysis of the Holocaust. Heinrich Hoffmann for writing Struwwelpeter in 1845. It's a great book for kids that teaches them valuable lessons like "cats will watch you burn to death if you play with matches" and "eat your soup or you will die." I love Germans.
Book you've faked reading:
Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul. It's like my own personal Mount Everest. I keep trying, and I keep turning back.
Book you are an evangelist for:
Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes. After four years of political indoctrination, in what should have been film school, here was this guy screaming "womyn is not a word, you moron!" and generally making me realize what nonsense I'd been through. It was a breath of fresh air.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Language Police by Diane Ravitch. I saw the book sitting on top of a bar and immediately interrupted some guy's date to ask him if I could look at it.
Book that changed your life:
All books change your life in some fashion. Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero convinced me not to move to Los Angeles. Dave English's Slipping the Surly Bonds made me sign up for flight training. And Drudge Manifesto persuaded me not to invite Matt Drudge over the house.
Favorite line from a book:
"Nothing reveals a lack of comic inventiveness more reliably than the presence of reflexive epithets, eliciting snickers not because they exist within any intentional 'context' but simply because they are crass words that someone is saying out loud."--Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason.
When I read that, she sold another book. I spent 10 years doing improv comedy in a group that never swore or went blue--not because we were prudes or saints but for the reason that she articulated perfectly.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Thinking about that book brings back memories of me really, really enjoying it. I just hope it was because I loved the book and not because I was a shy, friendless virgin in the boondocks with nothing else going on.