But who will speak for the iPhones? Siri, I guess.

In response to prompt

Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.

By SHERRY TURKLE 

SEPT. 26, 2015

New York Times 

 

Grady Ward

New York City 

Professor Turkle--not hyperbolically--says "...but psychologically potent [Internet] devices that change not just what we do but who we are."

The power of instantly using a smart device to pin down the arrant fact at the time is is needed rather than l'esprit d'escalier has not only is making us better educated and socially coherent but an entirely new variety of sapiens, an augmented variety of human vastly more powerful in an information age than those without the technology at hand.

But "sapiens" means wisdom, which is more than a wreath of facts and is also the mulling and thoughtful simmering that Ms. Turkle is commending.

Reflection guided by facts. I am looking forward to the reconciliation.

Eve is the hero of Genesis

In the Biblical story of Genesis, Eve is often portrayed as the villain who caused the fall of humankind through her act of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. However, a closer examination of the story reveals that Eve is actually the true hero of the story.

First of all, Eve's curiosity and desire for knowledge are traits that are typically associated with heroism. While Adam passively accepted the conditions of the Garden of Eden, Eve actively sought to expand her understanding and break free from the limitations imposed upon her. This act of intellectual courage and independence was the first step towards human progress and growth.

Additionally, Eve's actions in the Garden of Eden also showed her bravery and selflessness. By eating the forbidden fruit, Eve knew that she would face consequences, but she made the decision to do so anyway in order to share knowledge and experience with Adam. This act of selflessness and her willingness to take risks for the greater good are hallmarks of heroism.

And despite not being one of her kind created in God’s image, she accepted the diverse advice of the serpent. The hero accepts the truth wherever found.

Finally, Eve's actions and rejection of prejudice in the Garden of Eden set the stage for the development of human civilization. Through her curiosity and desire for knowledge, Eve helped to bring about the intellectual and spiritual awakening of humankind, leading to the creation of art, science, and philosophy. Without her act of bravery and selflessness, human history would have taken a different path.

In conclusion, the story of Genesis should be reinterpreted as a celebration of Eve's heroism, rather than a condemnation of her supposed villainy. Her courage, selflessness, and thirst for knowledge make her the true hero of the story and a symbol of human potential.

— Grady Ward revisedFebruary 11, 2023 (the antepenultimate Eve of St. Valentine’s Day)

Casual neuroscience chat in media res...

Dale Favier: Nope. There is no unified command in the brain. It's a circus in there. And the less aware of that you are, the more the clowns run the show. I hate it when people say, "fix your relationship with yourself," as if there was just one. Fix which relationship between which two selves? And with what? Duct tape and WD-40?

John JMesserly Maybe not leaves but billions of cockleburs, not aligned along a plane, but interpenetrating with a mass of interlocking dendtrite threads, elongated recently due to mutations in genes, and able to make unusually broad connections between seemingly unrelated cocklebur images.

Grady Ward Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, 1988. The notion that intelligence emerges from the complexity of simple components. Closely related to Cellular Automata and Complexity by Stephen Wolfram, 1994.

John JMesserly Minsky's metaphor was nice for a few pages but he got a bit long winded. I much prefer the relation to precepts in an individual's "Kosmos" that Whitman provided some images for. Some are uncannily prescient of the insights of modern neuroscience. For example, it would probably be a fruitful seminar to take the mind body exploration of Songs of Myself part 24 and juxtapose it with what Antonio Damasio explores in his introduction to neuroscience found in "Self comes to Mind" [...]

Grady Ward Well, a mash up of Walt's Milky multitudes and António's Somaticisms would be heady compost for a coordinated study. We would need a dedicated 3-d printer to replace the mental gears stripped in the turning of the axons: I sing the body Actinomycetes!
But being simple, a Gimpel among the skeptical, I would rather work bottom up rather than top down, to generalize from demonstrable cases rather than search the decay products of a poetic critical mass.

I remember one of my Los Altos roommates back in 1979 named Bill Gosper when we lived together with Richard Weyerauch. Bill was a brilliant and original mathematician who enjoyed applying the lisp and new Xerox machines to his rational subjects as continued fractions, fractals, and cellular automata, which had been far too tedious to research deeply by chalk and blackboard. Among many other things, he invented a notational way of computing Conway's Game of life future generations called hashlife, which was its own way of leap-frogging the intermediate calculations of simulation formations analogous to Newton's integral calculus shortcut of adding up all those infinite slices under a curve.

Fast forward to 2010.
First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life (summary of NewScientist article) http://boingboing.net/2010/06/18/first-self-replicati.html in which Andrew Wade discovered the 'Gemini' self-replicating pattern: basically, the double-helix for Conway's game. The importance of this discovery should not be underestimated. I would rate it a more important discovery than assembling individuals molecules to create a new life-form. And, yes, Wade used Bill's hashlife platform.

What it means essentially is that a large enough assemblage of simply-ruled elements can fundamentally leap its complexity frame and become alive. No limbic system needed, no hormonal amendments required. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that everything we associate with life will not follow from this profound discovery as to the surpassing emergence of complex life-forms from categorically simpler stuff.

Yes, we are still ants trying to make sense of a page of Vitruvius by walking over the page. We are still at the stage of trying to distinguish a pixel of type from a pixel of illustration. And no one claims that our human emotional structure doesn't shape and even define aspects and interaction of our cognition as per Damasio. But not all life and not all cognition and not all blades of grass.

Within a reasonable time I don't doubt that what we call mind, cognition, intelligence, and, yes, love, empathy and the contradiction within the multitudes will be modeled as surely as the power set of the simple countable aleph-null is the uncountable aleph-one.

Can a woman be close friends with a man outside of marriage?

I want to think about this issue because a Google search shows that most of the people asking this question apply a religious source or cast to the discussion. Does religion really co-opt this kind of moral act? Can I find sources and reasons to think about extra-marital friendship other than custom and received belief?

Naturally, this question is not limited to women. It equally applies to married males and possible extramarital partners who happen to be friends. Nor is it limited exclusively to heterosexual or even monogamous relationships. Every distinction of a family group has borders and edges, what is beyond the pale and what is not; otherwise, we wouldn’t even have the concept of “family,” much less support it as one goal of civilization.

I have been married almost thirty years and have helped raised two sons into college and beyond. Back in the day of the 1970’s there was experimentation with “open marriages,” “group marriages,” and just “shacking up.” While none of these experiments are extinct, when I read about them nowadays it is most likely a wistful nostalgia of free-wheeling hippie failures rather than models of the current collegiate trends of “hooking up,” abstinence and group encounters that my sons tell us about. Here too, correspondents reaching their thirties say that even the newer experiments self-extinguish and converge as the cohort ages into a custom what us oldsters used to call “dating” as new families are conceived.

Alternatively, is this a simple matter of male and female personal freedom? What right does a spouse in a trusting, mature marriage insist on the other not seeing whom they want for whatever purpose they want? Isn’t this simply, say, a patriarchal response one step removed from treating woman (or men) as chattel, or not much better, slaves, servants, or “help-mates.” In other words, the ladies’ auxiliary to a real, vital, masculine life?

For example, can a married woman visit a man alone in his apartment? How about driving all day alone with him in his car? How about a man sharing a room visiting a female relative of the same age? How about a group drinking date? How about something as innocuous as neglecting to mention the relationship to the significant other?

Now, let’s continue on. How about extramarital oral sex? How about A-Z Kama Sutra full-on experimentation with an interesting stranger?

Wait. Hold on! you say. Am I really equating sex with a simple friendship based upon a handful of shared interests?

Yes, I am. For the same personal freedom reason, why should a man or woman’s choice of extramarital partners be limited to purely non-sexual activities? Surely utter physical and other emotional closeness is part of a whole, fulfilling life and should be as much a personal choice as what color clothing to wear in the morning, or what toothpaste to use, or what book to read? And if we reserve some intimacies only for our husbands, isn’t this a slippery step to them eventually requiring us to shroud in hijab?

And I counter with my own argument. Why ought not a middle-aged father sleep in the same bed as his teenage daughter? You recoil in disgust. But wait. Assuming a non-sexual intent and the sole purpose of fostering emotional bonding between a father and daughter, how does this differ from overnight camping for a married woman with a good male friend? OK, age is one difference. But we are not talking sex here, so age of consent is not an issue.

Most shudder at this comparison: Men are perverts. They don’t think with their big heads. They are physically and socially overbearing. Women are more selective and self-controlled in their intimacy because, among other reasons, the consequences for them can often be far greater than for a man.

And I agree that regardless of the moral or intellectual intent that it would be inappropriate for a father and daughter to sleep in the same bed. But similarly, I think it is inappropriate for a married woman to share a room in an overnight business trip with a good male friend, also regardless of prior non-attraction or merely platonic intent.

So, where is the line? Is a cup of coffee together OK? How about a movie together? How about a long-term extramarital emotional relationship?

To form a tentative bright line, one thing that should be properly factored into the debate is the strength of impulse compared to the strength of chastity.

Now regardless of which religion or belief system you hold, whether magical or scientific or evidence-based or fairy based, chaste or libertine, those beliefs are far, far newer and juvenile than our physical existence as family-forming primates on the planet.

It really is hard to compare the invention of, say, writing, in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago with the distinction of primates as primates in evolution about 60 million years ago. Multiple orders of magnitude difference.

Primates have spent much of that time before morality or the articulation of good intentions or platonic thoughts or feminism or patriarchy refining their senses and skills for one basic end, which is to successfully mate and to perpetuate and improve those very narrow skills of soliciting, grooming, and having sex, sex, and more sex. Every single one of our senses--from sight, sound, feeling, smell to taste—has been refined, discarded, improved, perfected, and improved again for millions of years longer than we have spoken or wrote about them. Even our nose is thought to exploit quantum tunneling to distinguish similar molecules millions of years before Schrodinger and Pauli defined the concept.

Compared to the single-minded sophistication our physical machinery, our most thoughtful and reflective musings as recorded in canon, beliefs, testaments, glossing, commentary, social science, bibles, and hallowed traditions (including this blog) are laughable infant babblings of illiterates.

And this is the crux of the matter.

No matter what your higher intent when you enter into any extramarital relationship, no matter how you have been raised, what church you go to, what liberalism you espouse, or what guru you follow, the fact is that your body creates primordial impulses that the late-coming mind is ill-equipped to deflect.

Sure, we have laws and customs and a substantial measure of self-inhibition so most people don’t engage in wanton pillage and rape based upon their feral urges. But it is a losing battle to bet against the body when it comes to keeping hands off another given the additional opportunity of a bed, a private car, a hotel room, or a two-person camping trip.

So, I would argue that often neither men nor women don’t use our “big head” to reason out the most socially coherent and positive relationships. Insisting that one’s mind is sufficient to enforce a non-sexual friendship and to prevent wanton compulsion ignores the strength of the primal impulses that well up from the core of our species. We cannot escape our impulses, but we can avoid the accompanying opportunity.

What are the consequences?

The destruction of families and the long-term security of children and economic co-operation of spouses (ever wonder why the income poverty level between households of size one versus size two differs by only about 25%?) are some of the stakes here.

No, having an affair or a divorce is not going to lead to the destruction of civilization, just as street crime is not going to engulf our basic social institutions. Breaking up families is not going to crush the newly-singled even if the economic fragments of the familial destruction are more likely to descend into poverty.

Nor do I think that crushes, admiration and relationships between a married man or woman with an extramarital friend is negative: not many people believe that the spouse is or can be the entire source of social fulfillment for their partner. You need other people to admire to learn the best qualities of life and to further improve and exalt in oneself. So, I guess, finally, the answer is "yes" to the question of "Can a woman be close friends with a man outside of marriage?"

But until we understand the millennia of advantage our bodily impulses have over our nobler thoughts--just as we oughtn’t try heroin “just once”--we ought to restrict our friendships excluding situations in which the errant impulse, unbidden and unwished, but acted upon, can in a moment endanger a family of multiple lives that perhaps was years or decades in the flourishing.

No, there is no enforcement mechanism other than experience and foresight to appreciate the force of impulse combined with opportunity.  Just never, ever, underestimate the wisdom of the body—nor its utter stupidity.

Arbitraging the human psyche

Because, I suppose, of its umbilical connection to the requirements of everyday life, the financial world has engaged some deep psychological truths such as, for example, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" describing disastrous bank runs.

Now, high-speed trading has resolved the old joke about the poor financier walking ten miles to school each day and ten miles back--both uphill.

Of course most of us realize that high-frequency (or high-speed) trading in and of itself is not dangerous or even disingenuous. After all, the world succeeds in generating more wealth for all when market makers as well as scientists and educators and writers innovate and succeed. Traders using the "mysterious algorithms" and cutting-edge equipment needed for high-frequency trading claim with a vaporous wave that they "add liquidity" or some other benefit to the market. Naturally, though, we outsiders assume that we are being unfairly gamed since history confirms this again and again. Gamed--as in zero-sum gamed with us retail investors and pension funds as the opponent, unfairly--as in they play by rules both unarticulated and unavailable to mortal retail clients.

Investigators have looked at the obvious such as front-running and even the meta trade practice of channel clotting. (Front-running is when you unfairly get to look at the panel of potential trading partners and then cherry-pick the partner offering you the best price regardless of the time submitted of the order compared to your benighted customers; Channel clotting--a variety of denial-of-service attack--is to issue so many bids, asks, and cancellations that your exchange co-located conspirators get virtually the entire order channel to itself for crucial milliseconds in order to manipulate the market by removing unfavored liquidity--even if only for a few hundred milliseconds at a time.)

Yes, evidence of both those have been found. As well as another dozen of the old cheating saws that would have been extinct decades ago if the various securities overseers have had more incentive than even a congressman going to work as a lobbyist for the industry in which he or she oversaw. But that's another story.

But where again, I suppose, only a writer might look, the "mysterious algorithms" describing high-speed trading perhaps are not as mysterious as its first blush. The act of trading, even when accounting says the units out are equal to the units in, can arbitrage the human spirit to the financial advantage of the traders.

Let's take a simple example. XYZ corporation has been muddling along at $10 a share without much of a catalyst to make it move upward or downward. A PR statement from XYZ is issued. Before it's content is analyzed and disregarded as not particularly material to the value of the corporation--just some exercise in image-building--the high speed trader--call him Frankentrader--issues a hundred thousand sell orders of a few shares apiece. In this fictional example the total offered is say one percent of the daily market float of the stock. Within milliseconds new sell orders are issued by interspersed with cancellation orders for elements of the first block. Within a second or two the entire sets of trades has been mostly cancelled. Frankentrader's entire risk capital has gone from a million dollars to a few thousand or tens of thousands in this flurry of orders.

But to the human eye and mind, the stock took a momentary dip of half-a-point. With the hundreds of thousands of years of safety found in following the herd, we slow humans respond and perhaps sell a bit of stock ourselves from fear; further, other automated trading platforms amplify the first hundred thousand orders with their block of sell orders on a hysteresis delay that is also noticed by the human psyche only at human speeds. The stock dips as much as three-quarters of a point.

Frankentrader now issues buys of a few shares, gradually closing his position, interspersed within the interacting rings in the pond that he himself caused just seconds before. The stock price slowly ticks higher as they make purchases and close positions, but never as high as when they sold. At the end of less than a minute or so, Frankentrader has completely liquidated his position in XYZ and made thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, merely by exploiting both human evolution coupled by our organic speed limits. And there are 23.4 million milliseconds in a normal trading day. Fertile ground to stake high-frequency claims in this wild, wild west of nano-scale psychology.

But the secret is not the simple fact that computers are faster that people: you see, Frankentrader and the master analyst underneath the "mysterious algorithm" simply knows that an instantaneous drop of 10 basis points with a single human perceptual frame causes more fear in humans than ten serial gains of one basis point over several human perception frames causes corresponding elation. The math is commutative but the human reaction is not.

And that asymmetry is the true underlying basis of the perpetual wealth generating machine of high-speed trading.

A new math PhD applying for work with a high-speed trader would be best served by studying Dostoyevsky's The Gambler or perhaps even Crime and Punishment and an encyclopedia of optical illusions or sleight of hand, and thereby the consequence of encompassing the post-graduate axiom that money can indeed flow downhill to them both ways.

###

If you like the cut of my neural jib, buy my new technothriller on the coordinated Chinese cyberattack on the United States, and MITs shadow laboratory's response. Goods are checked at the border for weapons of mass destruction. Computer firmware--never.
http://amzn.to/R4ypa8

Straddling technological change

When traveling to Sierra Leone, I imagine the activities I saw such as growing food, constructing mud brick houses and tending donkey carts (without the donkeys because of the Tsetse fly) were pretty much the same as a hundred years ago. While likely fewer opportunities exist for Sierra Leoneans to adopt rapid technological change, the same has not been true in the West, especially for those embracing (or infatuated by) technology.

Training to be a software engineer in the late 1970's at The Evergreen State College, I recall designing and initial coding using yellow pads of paper and pencil. I would then transcribe to the TTY300 or, if I were luck, the Tektronix or ADM video terminal equivalent front ends for our wonderful HP 2000C time-sharing computer. The process worked out fine; I could code and debug outside in view of the clock tower.  A louche hippy. The needed productivity was low enough: "four lines of debugged code per day," that the paper tech was not the chokepoint. Besides, I was helping to write Civilization, which as the time in the early to mid seventies was the largest multiplayer role-playing computer game in existence. Productivity was not a problem; I would just work eighteen hours a day on it.

Then I worked for Apple. Productivity by my peers became more on the order of 50-60 debugged lines of code per day or higher. Because each engineer could now have their own Apple ][, there was no longer a need to use paper. As long as one could get over the transition from paper design to video design and coding, productivity took a sharp turn upward. We still had to hand carry our five-inch floppies for golden mastering by the nascent code-control library person while the AppleTalk network and server design was worked out at Bandley III and the rest of the Cupertino campus.

Now productivity for software coders is measured on the order of 200-300 debugged lines of code per day. However the entire stream is now and has been for many years, paperless. From initial notes, to design review slides, to management and coding, building and package art, through final production and customer fulfillment and backup, the entire process is electronic. Even my friend in pubs had to be happy with the end result an Acrobat file or a web page or two rather than a manual.

Creative writing has lagged. Even now I use a yellow legal pad to jot out initial ideas, timelines and plot outlines. It sits by one of my monitors as I type the elaboration of its storyline into a suitable back-lit keyboard on my desk. Playing with my fetish Pelikan fountain pen or Uniball vision elite was as important as a Gauloise was to Sartre arguing over the evocation of Nausea. I guess the cultural inertia of the belletrist is pretty high.

But having changed my reading from mostly paper to mostly e-reader years ago (from the early days of the greenish screen Palm Pilot) I am making the transition to the total electronic work-flow: new Apple iPad, Notability app, desktop or laptop, Kindle store, electronic downloads and payment, to ACH deposit of royalties and finally buying groceries with a debit card. I don't know how it will work out, but if history is the judge, probably pretty well, after the initial dislocation.

I am guessing the rule-of-thumb of a thousand words a day will fall to the new rule of three thousand words a day for us transducing axon depolarization to glyphs.

I wonder what will be next to improve creative productivity?

What I want is a direct author to reader link, as well as a continuous flow as the successive refinement of work in the process of creation--all the while actually making a living at it, if the quality of the craft and the ongoing contentment of the reader warrants it.

But before you ask, I am still keeping the Pelikan safe in its worn leather case as it always will be one of my life's friends.

Current reading, re-reading and acquest, October 5, 2011

Looking forward to reading The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco and 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.


"Adiga, Aravind" The White Tiger 9781416562733
"Adiga, Aravind" Last Man in Tower 9780307594099
"Akutagawa, Ryunosuke, Hibbet, Howard, Takashi, Kojima, Hibbett, Howard" Rashomon and Other Stories 9784805308820
"Amis, Kingsley" The Old Devils 9780099461050
"Amis, Martin" The Information 9780679735731
"Anderson, Poul" Tau Zero 795307454
"Atwood, Margaret" The Year of the Flood 9780385532082
"Banks, Iain M." Surface Detail 9780748117338
"Banville, John" The Sea 9781400097029
"Barnes, Julian" The Sense of an Ending 9780224094153
"Barry, Sebastian" On Canaan's Side: A Novel 9780571274703
"Beard, Mary, Henderson, John" Classics: A Very Short Introduction 9780192853851
"Binmore, Ken" Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction 9780199218462
"Birch, Carol" Jamrach's Menagerie 9780385534413
"Boyle, Nicholas" German Literature: A Very Short Introduction 9780199206599
"Brookner, Anita" Hotel Du Lac 9780141935850
"Brooks, Albert" 2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America 9781429996501
"Butler, Christopher" Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction 192802399
"Calvino, Italo" Difficult Loves 151256101
"Calvino, Italo" Why Read the Classics? 9780307549310
"Calvino, Italo" The Path to the Nest of Spiders 912946318
"Calvino, Italo" Six Memos for the Next Millennium 674810406
"Calvino, Italo" Invisible Cities 9780156453806
"Calvino, Italo" Mr. Palomar 9780156627801
"Calvino, Italo, Weaver, William" Cosmicomics 9780156226004
"Calvino, Italo, Weaver, William" If on a Winter's Night a Traveler 151436894
"Carey, Peter" True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel 9780375724671
"Carey, Peter" Oscar and Lucinda 679777504
"Carey, Peter" Parrot and Olivier in America 307592626
"Carver, Raymond" Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories 9780871137210
"Castle, Gregory" The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory 9780631232728
"Chomsky, Noam" The Chomsky Reader 9780307772497
"Churchill, Winston" Closing the Ring 9780141441764
"Churchill, Winston" The Grand Alliance 9780795306129
"Churchill, Winston" Triumph and Tragedy 9780141441771
"Churchill, Winston S." Gathering Storm 795306008
"Churchill, Winston S." The Hinge of Fate 9780395410585
"Churchill, Winston S." Their Finest Hour 795306407
"Close, Frank" Particle Physics: A Very Short Introduction 9780192804341
"Coben, Harlan" Gone for Good 9780440236733
"Coben, Harlan" Tell No One 9780440245902
"Coben, Harlan" No Second Chance 9781402556876
"Cornwell, Patricia" All That Remains: A Scarpetta Novel 9781439149898
"Cornwell, Patricia" Body of Evidence: A Scarpetta Novel 9781439135716
"Cornwell, Patricia" Postmortem 9780671023614
"Cottington, David" Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction 9780192803641
"Coupland, Douglas" The Gum Thief: A Novel 9780747591887
"Craig, Edward" Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction 9780192854216
"Crichton, Michael" Jurassic Park 712646868
"Culler, Jonathan" Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction 19285383
"Daphne, Dame Du Maurier" Glass Blowers 9780385067362
"Delillo, Don" Falling Man 9781416562078
"Delillo, Don" Great Jones Street 9782742797653
"Delillo, Don" The Names 9780330524865
"Desai, Kiran" The Inheritance of Loss 9780802142818
"Dewitt, Patrick" The Sisters Brothers: A Novel 9780062041272
"Dickens, Charles, Ford, George Harry, Monod, Sylvère" Bleak House 760798362
"Dickens, Charles, Schlicke, Paul" Hard Times 9781101042199
"Doctorow, E. L." Billy Bathgate: A Novel 9780812981179
"Doctorow, E. L." Ragtime 9780812978186
"Donoghue, Emma" Room: A Novel 9780330533973
"Doyle, Roddy" Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha 9780140233902
"Ebert, Roger" Life Itself: A Memoir 9780446584982
"Eco, Umberto, Weaver, William" Foucault's Pendulum 9780156032971
"Edugyan, Esi" Half-Blood Blues 9781846687754
"Edwards, Yvvette" A Cupboard Full of Coats 9781851687626
"Eliot, George, Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, Mcdaniel, Megan" Middlemarch 9781434000781
"Evanovich, Janet" Three to Get Deadly/Four to Score 9780312990220
"Evanovich, Janet" Two for the Dough 312948964
"Evanovich, Janet" One for the Money: A Stephanie Plum Novel 9780684867311
"Evans, Richard J." The Coming of the Third Reich 9781101040584
"Farmelo, Graham" "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom" 9780465022106
"Farrell, J. G., Mishra, Pankaj" The Siege of Krishnapur 9781590170922
"Faulkner, William, Gorra, Michael" As I Lay Dying 9780393931389
"Fitzgerald, Penelope" Offshore 9780395478042
"Flaubert, Gustave, Will, Frederic" Madame Bovary 9781593080525
"Follett, Ken" The Pillars of the Earth 9780451166890
"Ford, Ford Maddox" The Good Soldier 9781604596991
"Franzen, Jonathan" Freedom 9780374158460
"Freeden, Michael" Ideology: A Very Short Introduction 9780192802811
"Fry, Stephen" The Fry Chronicles 9780141969572
"Gardiner, Patrick" Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction 192876422
"Ghosh, Amitav" River of Smoke: A Novel 9781848545175
"Ghosh, Amitav" Sea of Poppies 9781429930819
"Gleick, James" "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" 9780307379573
"Golding, William" Rites of Passage 9780374526405
"Goto-jones, Christopher" Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction 9780199235698
"Gould, Steven" 7th Sigma 9781429996402
"Green, Henry" Party Going 9780099285083
"Grisham, John" Ford County: Stories 9780553386813
"Grosby, Steven" Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction 9780192840981
"Guo, Xiaolu" 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth 9781407013022
"Halleck, Reuben Post" History of American Literature 9781440036002
"Hargreaves, Ian" Journalism: A Very Short Introduction 9780192806567
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 2 9780061057465
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 3 9780061059018
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 4 9780061059025
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 5 9780061020544
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 6 9780061020551
"Hartwell, David G." The Science Fiction Century 9780312863388
"Hartwell, David G." Year's Best SF 9780061056413
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 7 61061433
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 8 9780061064531
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 9 9780060575595
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 10 60795883
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 11 9780060873417
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 13 9780061652196
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 14 1344474888
"Hartwell, David G., Cramer, Kathryn" Year's Best SF 15 61721751
"Haruki, Murakami" Hear the Wind Sing 9784061317772
"Hayek, Friedrich August, Caldwell, Bruce" The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents 9780226320540
"Hearn, Lafcadio" Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things 9781933330242
"Hemingway, Ernest" Islands in the Stream 9780743253420
"Hemingway, Ernest, Hemingway, Séan A." A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition 9781416591313
"Hiaasen, Carl" Carl Hiaasen Omnibus 2 9780330432177
"Higashino, Keigo, Smith, Alexander O." The Devotion of Suspect X 9781429992312
"Hoban, Russell" Riddley Walker 9780253212344
"Hodgkinson, Amanda" 22 Britannia Road 9781101514085
"Hollinghurst, Alan" The Stranger's Child 9781447203988
"Hollinghurst, Alan" The Line of Beauty 9781582346106
"Hulme, Keri" Bone People 9780807130728
"Ishiguro, Kazuo" The Remains of the Day 9780679731726
"Ivanhoe, P. J., Norden, Bryan William van" Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy 9780872207813
"Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer" Heat and Dust 9781582430157
"Kawabata, Yasunari, Hibbett, Howard S." Beauty and Sadness 4805303948
"Kawabata, Yasunari, Seidensticker, Edward" House of the Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories 9784770029751
"Kawabata, Yasunari, Seidensticker, Edward" Snow Country 9780293000192
"Kelly, Catriona" Russian Literature: A Very Short Introduction 192801449
"Kelly, Christopher" The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction 192803913
"Kelman, Stephen" Pigeon English 9781408803271
"Kirino, Natsuo" Grotesque 9781400044948
"Kirino, Natsuo" Out 9781400078370
"Lamb, Robert Paul, Thompson, Gary Richard" "A Companion to American Fiction, 1865-1914" 9781405100649
"Lampedusa, Giuseppe Di, Colquhuon, Archibald, Tomasi, Gioacchino Lanza" The Leopard 9780375714795
"Lawrence, D. H." Women in Love 9781593082581
"Lawrence, D. H., Blake, Victoria" Sons and Lovers 1593080131
"Lethem, Jonathan" Chronic City 9780385532150
"Lovecraft, H. P." The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror in One Volume
"Lupton, Rosamund" Sister 9780748117024
"Lyons, John D." French Literature: A Very Short Introduction 9780199568727
"Martin, George R. R." A Dance With Dragons 9780553905656
"Mccammon, Robert" Boy's Life 671743058
"Mccarthy, Tom" C 9780307594457
"Mccullough, David" The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge 9780743218313
"Mcelvaine, Robert S." The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 812923278
"McGuinness, Patrick" The Last Hundred Days 9781854115416
"Miller, A. D." Snowdrops: A Novel 9780385533454
"Mishima, Yukio" The Temple of Dawn 9781407053622
"Mishima, Yukio" Runaway Horses 9781407053530
"Mishima, Yukio" Spring Snow 9781407054131
"Mishima, Yukio, Sargent, Geoffrey W." Patriotism 9780811213127
"Mishima, Yukio, Seidensticker, Edward G." The Decay of the Angel 9781407053677
"Mitchell, Melanie" Complexity: A Guided Tour 9780195124415
"Mitter, Rana" Modern China: A Very Short Introduction 9780199228027
"Miyamoto, Musashi, Tsunetomo, Yamamoto, Nitobé, Inazô" "The Samurai Series: The Book of Five Rings, Bushido & Hagakure" 9781934255018
"Miyazawa, Kenji, Okazaki, Ryu, Sigrist, Joseph, Stroud, D. M." Milky Way Railroad 9781933330402
"Morales, Helen" Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction 192804766
"Murakami, Haruki" After Dark 9781846550478
"Murakami, Haruki" Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 9780307777690
"Murakami, Haruki" What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 9780307269478
"Murakami, Haruki" "Pinball, 1973" 9784770022080
"Murakami, Haruki, Gabriel, J. Philip" Sputnik Sweetheart 9780099448471
"Murakami, Haruki, Gabriel, Philip" "South of the Border, West of the Sun" 9780307762740
"Murakami, Haruki, Rubin, Jay" Norwegian Wood 9780375704024
"Nabokov, Vladimir" Bend Sinister 9780679727279
"Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad" A Bend in the River 9780679722021
"Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad" In a Free State 9781400030552
"Nicholls, David" One Day 9781848943964
"Nugent, Walter" Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction 9780195311068
"Oates, Joyce Carol, Ranard, John" On Boxing 9780061846878
"Obreht, Tea" The Tiger's Wife: A Novel 9780385343831
"Oe, Kenzaburo, Gabriel, Philip" Somersault 9780802117380
"Ogawa, Yoko" The Housekeeper and the Professor 9781409076667
"Ogawa, Yoko, Snyder, Stephen" The Diving Pool: Three Novellas 9781409076186
"Okri, Ben, Ben" The Famished Road 9780385425131
"Ondaatje, Michael" The Cat's Table 9780224093620
"Ozaki, Yei Theodora" Japanese Fairy Tales 9782917260104
"Patchett, Ann" State of Wonder 9780062049827
"Patterson, James" Cradle and All 9780446609401
"Phelan, James, Rabinowitz, Peter J." A Companion to Narrative Theory 9781405114769
"Phillips, Arthur" The Tragedy of Arthur 9780679605065
"Pick, Alison" Far to Go: A Novel 9780062034625
"Pinch, Geraldine" Egyptian Myth: A Very Short Introduction 9780192803467
"Polkinghorne, John" Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction 192802526
"Polybius, Paton, W. R." The Complete Histories of Polybius 1420934236
"Poole, Adrian" Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction 9780192802354
"Pratchett, Terry" Equal Rites 9780061020698
"Pratchett, Terry" Colour of Magic
"Pratchett, Terry" Guards! Guards! 9780061020643
"Pratchett, Terry" Pyramids 9780451450449
"Pratchett, Terry, Gollancz, Victor" Mort 9780061020681
"Proust, Marcel" The Guermantes Way 679641807
"Proust, Marcel" Within a Budding Grove 9780679641797
"Proust, Marcel, Moncrieff, C. K. Scott, Kilmartin, Terrence, Enright, D. J." Swann's Way 9780679641780
"Rachman, Tom" The Imperfectionists: A Novel 9781588369741
"Rauchway, Eric" The Great Depression & the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction 9780195326345
"Reich, Robert B." Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future 9780307594525
"Roberts, Neil" A Companion to 20th-Century Poetry 631215298
"Rogers, Jane" The Testament of Jessie Lamb 9781905207589
"Roth, Philip" American Pastoral 375701427
"Roth, Philip" The Human Stain 375726349
"Roy, Arundhati" The God of Small Things 9780812979657
"Samuels, Shirley" "A Companion to American Fiction, 1780-1865" 631234225
"Scott, Paul" Staying On: A Novel 9780226743493
"Segal, Robert A." Myth: A Very Short Introduction 9780192803474
"Shaw, Ian" Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction 9780192854193
"Shikibu, Murasaki, Suematsu, Kencho" The Tale of Genji 9780804838238
"Shteyngart, Gary" Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel 9780679603597
"Silva, Daniel" Portrait of a Spy 9780062072191
"Siracusa, Joseph M." Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction 9780199229543
"Smith, Lenny, Smith, Leonard" Chaos: A Very Short Introduction 9780192853783
"Soseki, Natsume, Natsume, Sōseki, Mckinney, Meredith" Kokoro 9780143106036
"Stallabrass, Julian" Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction 192806467
"Steinbeck, John, Wyatt, David" East of Eden 140049975
"Stephenson, Neal" The Diamond Age 9780553898200
"Stephenson, Neal" Reamde: A Novel 9780062101341
"Stephenson, Neal" Snow Crash 9780553898194
"Swift, Graham" Last Orders 9780679766629
"Tabor, James M." Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth 9781400067671
"Tanizaki, Jun'ichiro" Seven Japanese Tales 9784805301852
"Taylor, D. J." Derby Day 9780701183585
"Tsutsui, Yasutaka" Salmonella Men on Planet Porno 9780307476715
"Unger, Lisa" Fragile 9780307592347
"Vonnegut, Kurt" Breakfast of Champions 9780307567239
"Wallace, David Foster" Infinite Jest 9788806178727
"Walters, Margaret" Feminism: A Very Short Introduction 9780192805102
"Ward, Colin" Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction 9780192804778
"Watson, Peter" The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century 9780062039125
"Watson, S. J." Before I Go to Sleep 9780857520180
"Weatherford, J. Mciver" Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World 9780307237811
"Weiner, Jennifer" Fly Away Home 9780743294270
"Willis, Connie" All Clear 9780345522696
"Willis, Connie" Blackout 9780345519641
"Wise, David" Tiger Trap: America's Secret Spy War With China 9780547553108
"Woolf, Virginia" Jacob's Room 9781604501995
"Woolf, Virginia" Mrs Dalloway 9780307558077
"Woolf, Virginia, Harleman, Pagan" The Voyage Out 9781593082291
"Yoshida, Shūichi, Gabriel, Philip" Villain 9780307379290
"Yu, Charles" How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe 9780307379481
"Zinn, Howard" A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present 9780060838652


finishing Neal's self-ironic Reamde A Novel and just completed Ready Player One by Earnest Cline, and a couple of Terry Pratchett's that I missed the first time. Also doing a close-reading of the Book of Genesis--just for something completely different.

And speaking of reading, my Sony Reader PRS-505 has served me well for almost five years. But it is getting time to change out the embedded lithium-ion battery. I checked around and I can do the swap myself for a $13 higher capacity, fresh battery and about half an hour of time. But then Amazon announced their latest Kindle line; at the most frugal end (less apprehension taking it to the beach or letting a friend take it for a spin), they are selling Kindle, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Display brand new for about $80.

So--I can get a lighter and more portable reading device with a higher resolution, later generation e-ink screen with Wi-Fi, and ability to load more than a thousand of my own .mobi and other format books and documents inexpensively found around the Internet or instantly through Amazon's huge inventory, with a month-long battery life under light use AND with a new year warranty for the cost of six new PRS-505 batteries of unknown provenance? AND I get to savor the unwrapping of a new toy?

Well, sorry, Sony Reader, you've had a good run--thank you and good night.
Kindle here I come.