[For one week in July 2009, I took over as a guest blogger at the Electric Velocipede website while editor John Klima was away. This was the last of the four posts I contributed. My prompt was: “What book would people be surprised to learn that you enjoyed?
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I'm not sure if anyone has enough of an impression of my reading habits in their heads to be surprised by any of the books I might cop to having loved. I've considered and discarded at least a dozen titles on the grounds that they probably wouldn't be surprising or shocking enough. Would it startle anyone to know that the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey is one of my favorite books? A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving? Orson Scott Card's early collection Unaccompanied Sonata and Other Stories?

Maybe people who've read a lot of my short fiction would be surprised to know that crime fiction is one of my favorite things to read. When I get on a crime jag, I go through them like bonbons. Wait, a tough-guy hero would never cop to eating bonbons. Let's say I can go through them like a twelve-pack of Old Style.

I can't get enough Elmore Leonard. I'm addicted to Donald E. Westlake's Dortmunder novels, and I'm sad there will never be another one. Westlake took Richard Stark with him when he died, which means there will also never be another Parker novel. I was devastated by Charlie Huston's Hank Thompson trilogy, which I find superior to his Joe Pitt vampire series. I love decrypting the compressed violent poetry of James Ellroy. And a couple of my favorite non-fiction books of all time inhabit the same region of the literary map: Education of a Felon by Edward Bunker, and Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon.

Is that surprising at all? Or is it obvious that deep down I want to be Parker?