One interesting thing about meeting readers face-to-face like I've been doing lately is the instant, two-way nature of our interactions. It's a different experience than the asynchronous, often-one-way street of email that I'm used to. I don't just "broadcast and wait" like I do when I send these newsletters. Nope -- live people actually tend to talk right back at me. Go figure.

They react to my books. They show interest. More often than not, they tell me that they like to read "all sorts of things" instead of having a single, preferred genre.

But they also ask me questions. They look at the 80+ books I have laid out in front of them ... and then, overwhelmed, they sometimes ask me, "Well, what's your favorite book?"

But oh man. That's like asking who's my favorite child.

My getting that question has led to some soul-searching, because rather than stare dumbly at people when they ask, I'd like to actually have an answer. So I've thought. And thought. And then I decided that okay, I guess I have some favorites ... but all of them are conditional. I don't have a flat-out SINGLE favorite, but hey, if it helps you, below are SEVERAL of my favorites, along with the conditions under which they're most awesome.

My first love

​The Bialy Pimps gets top billing here because it was my first novel EVER, but it's also extremely underrated. The Bialy Pimps is really funny, and funny is awesome.

If you want to see where JBT began, this is where ... seeing as I started the first draft in 1999, when I was still in grad school. This novel is closest to baring my innermost self, as absurd as it is. If you liked Clerks, you'd probably love The Bialy Pimps.

My most popular

Okay, I know that this is supposed to be about MY preferences rather than the public's preferences, but it's hard for me not to love the book that's been read by and loved by the most people. And that book, my friends, is Fat Vampire, which as you know became a TV show. To this day, it's my wife's favorite. FV has been read by over a million people, and that's pretty damn cool.

The book I'd most like to be remembered for

Let's pretend that after I'm dead, the world will remember me for one and only one book, but I get to choose the book.

In that case, I wouldn't pick Fat Vampire even though I love Fat Vampire. Nope; I only get one choice and FV just isn't weird enough. It doesn't cover the breadth of my genre-bending catalog enough. So in that case I'd choose the book that one reader described as "If Stephen King was on acid when he wrote The Dark Tower," and that's Unicorn Western.

The book that's closest to my heart

This superlative pretty easily falls to Winter Break, because I wrote it for my daughter when she was 15. Most parents don't get to give their kids complete novels dedicated to them, but I was able to. I won't lie; the experience was pretty great.

The story is riveting. It's a young adult thriller about a college girl who ends up snowbound with her parents just as the psychosis starts and bones start breaking. Sort of like The Shining without ghosts.

My favorite stand-alone novel

I can't decide on this one. It's between Devil May Care (On the Road meets a brain-melting mindfuck) and Pretty Killer (an Agatha Christie style dinner party murder mystery. The former never sells, where the latter sells like gangbusters. Go figure.

And lastly, my favorite series

Favorite series is different from favorite book. My favorite series is an unconventional one, although it's associated with a very conventional one. The conventional, expected series would be The Beam -- which, don't get me wrong, is a reader favorite and one I love. But nope: my favorite of all is The Future of Sex.

There's a long and storied history to The Future of Sex, but all you really need to know is that it's a 12-part "chosen one" science fiction story told in Sean's and my world of The Beam. It's set in the year 2060 (The Beam begins in 2097) and tells the story of Chloe Shaw, a naive newcomer to the O Corporation: a monolithic empire bent on controlling human desire for profit through neural implants and psycho-social manipulation made possible by the fledgling Crossbrace AI network. If you've read The Beam, you know that Crossbrace was the progenitor of The Beam itself. Chloe's is the story of the dark underbelly of that network, and how the future world almost became something very different than it did.

What I love about this story is mostly Chloe. She's awesome. She's also sympatico with the brand-new and not-at-all-understood Beam network in a way nobody understands (said reason is revealed halfway through the series), and learns that the Beam's AI obeys her in ways it will later only obey Nicolai Costa. I really love my kick-ass heroines, and Chloe is the best of them. This is a story about love, lust, and commerce, and the lines drawn through all of them in the name of power.

If you're interested, you can absolutely read FOS all by itself because it's self-contained. However, it also ties directly into The Beam in a hundred different places. You'll see the origin stories of so many of the later players, plus Easter eggs that Beam fans will dig the hell out of.

If you're a sci-fi fan and all of this sounds like something you'd be into, I suggest reading FOS between Seasons 3 and 4 of The Beam. You don't need to read in that order, but that's how we wrote it, so that's how the world logic unfolds best in my mind. Chloe isn't even in the first three seasons of The Beam, but then Sean and I wrote FOS and ended up tying it right into the core story. At the end, we saw that Chloe's story wasn't really finished, so she's a pivotal character in Beam Seasons 4 and 5.

Anyway, now you know my favorites, even though I couldn't narrow it down to one. What's your favorite?

JT