I offer these responses to the kind inquiries of many readers--and so that perhaps you will find the sometimes unusual shifts of subject matter and oddball characters and occurrences in my Balona Books more tolerable and understandable.

Some of My Favorite Books and Authors

• War and Peace by Tolstoy.
• Ulysses by James Joyce.
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Remarque.
• Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb.
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Little Honesty by Jonathan Pearce
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
• Short Stories of William Trevor
• The works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Whitman, Browning, Mark Twain, Robertson Davies, Robert Newton Peck, Richard Peck, Frost, Cummings, Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Salman Rushdie, James Thurber, Wallace Stevens, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Ford, Patrick O'Brian, Anne Tyler, Christopher Paul Curtis, Martin Cruz Smith, Judy Blume, Richard Dokey, Gail Giles, Alan Furst, Arthur Slade, Chris Crutcher, John LeCarre, Charles McCarry....

Some of My Favorite Composers
J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, Puccini, Rachmaninof, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Samuel Barber, Stanworth Beckler, Jobim

Some of My Favorite Music Performers
YoYo Mah, Wesla Whitfield, Tony Bennett, Dave Brubeck, Chanticleer, Jussi Bjoerling, Renee Fleming, Placido Domingo, Samuel Ramey

My Most Favorite Painter
J.M.W. Turner

• Well, I write!--and listen to instrumental music while writing. I find it impossible not to listen to lyrics and so do not listen to vocal/choral music while engaged in writing. However, I'm a real fan of a cappella choral singing.
• Try to market my BalonaBooks. As a non big-time author, I must publicize my own works or spend a fortune having someone else do it. Word of mouth is really the only thing that works in the long run. So, if you like BalonaBooks, send for and display a Balona bumper sticker, and tell your friends!
• I enjoy my family.
• And I read. I complete four or five books a week, now that I'm not teaching full-time. Actually, I read at fifteen or sixteen, as I enjoy moving from one to another and back again. Fiction, history, military history, philosophy, poetry, biological science, linguistics.
• I'm revising a few of my earlier books and creating new interior designs for them.
• I play the cello, enjoying especially the unaccompanied suites of Bach. I listen to the master Yo-Yo Ma do his thing, and to string quartets, symphonies, choral music, art songs.
• I walk and meditate.
• I have practiced martial arts for some time.

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