Shelfies #53: Christopher Farnsworth

My shelves are pretty disorganized these days. After our living room flooded on New Year’s Day more than a decade ago, we installed the giant built-in bookcases I always wanted. They stayed neat and clean for almost a full year, but now they are stacked and double-stacked with my latest random purchases. Jack Kirby is next to Edward St. Aubyn is next to Claire North. I have their locations stored in my head, because there’s no apparent rhyme or reason.

These shelves, however, are where I still maintain some semblance of order. This is what I call my “Friends and Well-Wishers” section: people I know or have met or have blurbed or have blurbed my books; people I admire; people I’m lucky enough to call friends; people I consider friends even if we’ve never met in real life. We had wildfires threatening big swathes of Los Angeles recently — you may have seen the news — and these are the books I’d go back to rescue if we had to evacuate.

My teacher and friend John Rember’s books are in there. He was the professor who convinced me the world has enough lawyers and put me on the track to writing. His A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World looks more prophetic every day. Mouth to Mouth is a story of ambition, greed, and secrets by my friend Antoine Wilson. It is the only book on my shelves also officially endorsed by Barack Obama. I just finished Karma Doll, the third book in the Happy Doll series by Jonathan Ames, about a PI struggling to adhere to a non-violent path when he also has to kill some truly abominable people. I love Ian Tregillis’s Bitter Seeds trilogy, which is both gracefully written and insanely inventive. (I was a fan before we ever met, but now I know him in real life too, and he’s a bona fide genius.) I have Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss on this shelf as well. She crosses genres the way the rest of us cross a street; I aspire to write as beautifully as she does one day.

And of course, there are several books by a guy named Tidhar.

Christopher Farnsworth is the author of eight novels, which have been optioned for film and television and translated into ten languages. His most recent book, Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets, the latest in the Jesse Stone series, is on sale this month. He lives in Los Angeles with his family.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. For more Shelfies, please join us on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.