MY FAVOURITE: Part Five - Adam Christopher

Hi Guys,

Hopefully everyone is suitably recovered from the weekend by now, and ready for the latest in our great series of mini-interviews with our superb line-up of Discover Festival authors. Today the spotlight falls on Adam Christopher, whose novel Empire State is already garnering rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. As always, it's a good read, with a whole host of interesting choices...

Enjoy!



MY FAVOURITE: PART FIVE - ADAM CHRISTOPHER

FAVOURITE BOOK

The most difficult question of all! Actually, no, that's your next one. My favourite book tends to change with the day of the week, as I more have a pool of books I all consider to be utterly wonderful and essential - 'Salem's Lot by Stephen King, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Slights by Kaaron Warren, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. At the moment I'm reading Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin for the first time, and I suspect that's going to be added to the group as well.

I think life is too short to read bad books, so I'm not one of these readers who is determined to reach the end of a novel even if they're not enjoying it. This means, thankfully, that most of what I do read seems to be pretty good.

FAVOURITE AUTHOR

The same applies here - my "pool" of favourites includes HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Lauren Beukes, Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, Gail Simone, Kurt Busiek - because I tend to read a lot of comics as well as novels I tend not to distinguish between writers in different media.

FAVOURITE GENRE FILM

Ghostbusters. In fact, Ghostbusters is the greatest film ever made. It's sheer genius, and I will happily fight anyone who says otherwise!

*rolls up sleeves*

FAVOURITE NON-GENRE FILM

Tricky, because I tend to watch mostly genre stuff. I'd love to be able to say Blow-Up, which is a film I have pretended to like since I was about 15 but which is a little... well, it's boring, let's face it.

So it has to be the original Michael Caine version of The Italian Job.

FAVOURITE TV SHOW

Community. And Doctor Who (original series only). And Justified. And Fringe. And Revenge. And... okay, I've done it again, haven't I?

FAVOURITE BAND

The Cure. I discovered them when someone left a tape of their first album, Three Imaginary Boys, at my house in 1991. So, despite being entirely the wrong age group, I pretty much listened to their stuff in release order, and have been listening to them ever since. In fact, I even measure my life as the gap between Cure concerts - I was 15 when I first saw them in New Zealand in 1992, then 30 when I next saw them in London. I'd doubled in age! Crazy.

I have to make a special mention here of The Dandy Warhols too - the only other band I've been listening to for anything like as long as The Cure (since 1996).

FAVOURITE GAME

I don't game as much as I used to, despite having one of everything in the house - I've played a lot of World of Warcraft but MMORPGs are just too much of a timesink, so I tend towards console games now. I think Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is probably my favourite game - it is insanely good, possibly the PS3's crowning glory.

But I have a soft spot for the classic space trading game Elite. My parents bought an Amstrad CPC464 (with built-in tape drive) for me for Christmas around 1986, and Elite just blew me away. I know Elite was originally developed for the BBC Micro and the Amstrad port is slightly different, but that's the version I played for hours, days, weeks, months, even years. And I never got to the Elite rating either, I only hit Deadly. I suspect the Amstrad port - which was missing a few things - might have also been missing the final combat rating!