Bookshelf: Peter Sallade, Beijing International Movie Festival Organizer

The books on my shelf with the most sentimental value are New Mutants #1-100, The Neverending Story, The Stand, The Coming of the King by Nikolai Tolstoy, Marya Morevna (English translation, with all the illustrations), A Primer On Robotics, and the Big Book of Bible Stories for Kids. Also some awful Star Trek novels, especially the ones by Diane Duane.

The book I pretend to have read, but haven't really is Journey To The West. Never finished it, damn library wanted it back. I’ve watched enough TV versions to fill in the gaps!

Bathroom reading? Cracked.com and The Beijinger!

The book I hid before you came around was Roger Zelazny's The Chronicles of Amber.

My favorite book from childhood was the X-Men comics, especially during Chris Claremont's run as writer.

The book I’m saving for old age is The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Maybe it'll give me some tips.)

The book that changed my life was Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal. Not because I agree with it! I despise biodeterminism, but Wright's spicy arguments deliberately allow for so many openings to rail against it. It taught me how to smack down the biodeterminists.

Character I’d like to meet … there's a short story in a compilation of shorts by Anthony Burgess. It's about a dude with a time machine who goes back in time to tell his favorite writers – Shakespeare, Chaucer, Cervantes, et al., how totally awesome they are. I want to meet that dude, take his time machine, and then be him, visiting Lovecraft and Tolkien and Hunter S. Thompson to praise the power of their works.

A character in a book I've had a crush on is Lin, the Khepri artist in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Instead of having a human head, her head is a giant scarab beetle. So hot!

The book with the best ending is The Revenants, by Sherri S. Tepper. Also Stephen King's The Dark Tower. (I am probably the only person in the world who was satisfied by the endings!)

The book with the best beginning would be a copy of Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted, bookmarked to the "Guts" chapter with a loud note insisting, “READ THIS FIRST!”

The book I wish I hadn't read was a self-published novel written by a kind acquaintance. It was so f***ing bad. Then when I told him my opinion and started up a little critique to suggest ideas for a necessary rewrite, his heart clenched and he turned into a cold motherf***ing assclog.

The book that surprised me most was the autobiography of Johnny Rotten, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Also, the real story of Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols ... Wow. Just, wow. It's enough to cynicize any punk.

The book I'd like to see adapted as a film is Her Fearful Symmetry, the second novel by Audrey Niffenegger. It is a sad tragedy that The Time Traveler's Wife, an excellent book, was adapted into a horribly shitty movie. The very structure and tone of the book did not allow for it to be converted into the video medium through any other means besides complete deconstruction and re-imagining. Niffenegger specifically wrote her second novel with film in mind. It would make a great movie!

The fictional worlds I’d most like to be part of are the amazing realms of fantastic mysteries from William Gibson's “Blue Ant” series, which includes Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History.

The book most likely to turn you into an aspiring filmmaker would be your mother's erotic diary. (Cue the funky bassline.)

Click here to see the January issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photo: Courtesy of Peter Sallade