Picocosmographia by William Van Hecke

This is the shelf of everything. You can also see the shelf of items and moments I have written thoughts about or the shelves of items by year finished.

There are 943 finished items here.

ファイブスター物語 14

Cover of ファイブスター物語
Author — 永野護
Finished — 2025-04-15
Started — 2021-02-07

Four years trying to get through this; the hardest volume for me, on account of how much of it is just military operations conveyed by close-ups of characters talking from inside GTM cockpits or vague “outside” locations, with minimal detail in the way of environments, objects, culture, or general sense of flavor. Every now and then you get to look at a GTM from the outside.

But even Nagano advises that folks skip ahead whenever they find they’re not enjoying an FSS story, and in the spirit of tadoku I finally took him up on it. I dashed through to the end and into Volume XV, already bringing me back to what I love about this series.

スピリット サークル 2

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2025-04-15
Started — 2025-03

This volume deepens the sense of what it might really be like to become aware of one’s past lives, if such a thing were true. It successfully made me feel the gravity of waking up having witnessed your own entire lifespan in a medieval Europe or an ancient Egypt.

Off Book 340: Spark of Salvador Dali

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-04

It may be my favorite Jessica McKenna fact that she of course always built Lego sets exactly according to the instructions and then left them in that perfectly constructed state. The childhood version of me who did that, displaying them all on a shelf, appreciates her for that. (It also seems significant that I later dumped all the Legos in a huge bin and invited the neighborhood over to create their own domains all across my room for a summer.)

A Story

Author — Kim Stanley Robinson
Finished — 2025-03-16

KSR on Wolfe, including a detour through Proust!

What I mean is that after Wolfe read Proust, he understood he was free, free to become himself in any way he wanted, to become, like Proust, one of the great Modernist writers, all of whom make their own tradition, style, subject matter, and reality. After you’ve read a novel that contains a 240-page garden party, why should you fear anything? You can’t. Anything is possible.

A genius in Wolfe: and if there are any fellow postmodern materialists reading this and groaning at the idea of there being anything unusual inside an artist or anyone else, anything beyond the workings of the brain, I will agree immediately, but point out that the latest news from brain science makes it clearer and clearer that saying “only the brain” is not much of a delimiting statement. The brain is not a clockwork, nor a steam engine, nor a binary or digital computer, nor any of the machines we conceptualize it to be with our simple metaphors based on our own feeble handiwork, as if the brain could only be as complex as something we ourselves could make. Very much not the case. The brain is a kind of pocket universe. The mind is huge, and consciousness a small part of it. The unconscious may well be inhabited by “subroutines,” as the computer people would have it, processes that may actually be more like characters. Maybe they are like Jungian archetypes—a shadow seems likely, perhaps an anima or animus—but who knows. Very probably the brain consists of organizations even stranger and more various than that. It may be a kind of library of stories all telling themselves at once. And by way of stories written down, one unconscious mind communicates with other unconscious minds.

His stories usually are not allegories but events in themselves, something like dreams or vases.

Off Book 338: Mistake on a Plate

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-03

Favorites:

Notable for being Zroundbls’s early favorite during their induction into fandom. Feels like part of a little golden age for Off Book, along with “The Center of the Bullseye”, “The Names of Our Family”, etc.

Off Book 339: A Club for You

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-03

Favorites:

Off Book 340: The Center of the Bullseye

Author — Jessica McKenna & Zach Reino
Finished — 2025-03

All-time favorite Off Book song: “Keeping it Plain”. I’d like to analyze this one line by line, rhyme by rhyme.

スピリット サークル 1

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2025-03
Started — 2025-03

I’d worked my way through a couple of volumes of 惑星のさみだれ from the big Mizukami pile that my brother-in-law lent me, but set it aside for its unremitting shounenness. This series, he assured me, is more “spiritual”. So far I’m quite enjoying the admixture of the everyday modern Japanese setting and historically-inspired past societies.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Cover of A Canticle for Leibowitz
Author — Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Finished — 2025-01-01
Started — 2024-12-07

Late in high school I was sitting in the lobby of the administrative wing of my boys’ Catholic school. I cannot for the life of me remember what I was there for, but it has an equal chance of being because I was in big trouble for something, or because I was doing some sort of collaboration or meeting with someone important at the school. I was doing a reread of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps in the big Bible-looking edition I was proud to have. Someone’s mom was coming out from the school office and she stopped in her tracks, striking up a conversation with me about books. She was impressed to see a student her son’s age reading one of her favorites. I have no idea whose mom she was. We connected easily and she made several recommendations, including A Canticle for Leibowitz and the work of Tom Robbins. I ended up reading several Robbins books soon after, but never got around to Canticle. (At some point I think I started confuse it with Flowers for Algernon.)

There’s apparently a copyright issue keeping the book off of the US Kindle store, but I found a SF Masterworks edition on the JP store and stripped the DRM.

ChatGPT looked at my reading list and, based on what it knows about me, acted surprised that I hadn’t read it yet.

A warning of the fragility of humanity’s extraordinarily low-entropy state: all the intricate interconnections between systems of political order, prosocial culture, objective understanding of the world, and the transmission of that understanding. We take it for granted how far we’ve come since the dawn of the Enlightenment, but rather than taking us back to a time before we had it, this book takes us ahead to a future where we’ve destroyed it and rejected attempts to salvage it.

A portrait of the devotion of individuals to give their entire striving lifetime just to get one iota closer to a promise of a distant and unknown better state; or at least to minimize our backsliding away from it. The parallels between religious faith and the faith that we can make sense of the world and meaningfully better our state in it. The portrait of centuries of longing toward a world that’s actually meaningfully different and even better. The absurdity and the poignancy of individual fallible humans trying to assemble themselves together into less-fallible, anti-fragile, progress-making super-humans. The necessity of reverence (ever more vanishing since Miller’s time) for the success of such projects.

Hello from the Sikaku, where I’m glimpsing the Eternal in A Canticle for Leibowitz’s third part: Fiat Voluntas Tua. What’s grabbing me about this text is the explicit connection of religion, particularly the long and “unbroken” heritage of Catholicism as an organizing principle for reverence and devotion; the project of science as an effort to understand and make sense of truths about our physical universe; and the fate of humanity as an instantiation of self-aware consciousness and civilization. All of these are founded on the same longing to behold the Eternal.

The Anxious Generation

Cover of The Anxious Generation
Author — Jonathan Haidt
Finished — 2024-11-16
Started — 2024-08-31

Four aspects of “real-world” interactions

Stephen points out a main message of Haidt’s book — people are growing up with too little nurturance of the spirit. This connects to my own wish for my kids to have a sense of reverence, for something.

Went to some trouble to find the Meta deck described as “chilling” in this book, and it was… just a normal marketing deck that probably didn’t significantly influence any product decisions, and which had some maliciously-misinterpretable slides way into the appendix. A significant Gell-Mann effect moment for me.

Overall, though, I appreciated my usual periodic dose of Haidt telling society to get a grip on itself, and the simple reminders of concepts like:

Original Love

Cover of Original Love
Author — Henry Shukman
Finished — 2024-11-11
Started — 2024-08-16

Shukman has been my main conduit to Zen, and I’ve recently shifted from Sam Harris’s Waking Up course to his The Way course for a more focusedly Zen-based practice. I picked this up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, partly to have an excuse to look around for something there on my second visit in two nights, during a precious two-night stay there for work, my first time really spending time in the city since moving away eight years ago. This was a fine tour of the concepts undergirding the practices of The Way, and left me with even more of an appetite to find the right text for getting deeply into kōans, preferably in (modern) Japanese. I’ll treasure the memory of reading this with Robert Wyatt’s Comicopera in my AirPods at the Kanamachi McDonald’s, where I’d stopped for a maximally quick meal before picking up my kid at school: the pleasant discord of the Wyatt particularly amenable to blending with the background music and advertisements — logos and mythos; mind and soul.

Some say other life-forms are practicing too: trees are masters of stillness, fortitude, and graceful acceptance, and whales move through the seas suspended in oceanic awareness, communicating with one another across vast distances. Even smaller creatures move through their lives with the focus and intention of master meditators: ants tirelessly follow the call of their nature, and mice, moths, and patient cattle all practice and implicitly trust the life they are given.

We were hungry for inspiration. We tracked the contemporary poets we loved and then tracked the thread back to the poets they had loved: to Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the Imagist poets of London just before the First World War. From them, we followed their provenance back to Wordsworth and Shakespeare, but also to ancient China, to the Tang dynasty poets they had loved and translated to Hanshan, the “Cold Mountain” poet, and Tu Fu, Li Po, and Wang Wei, who had wandered the ravines and cloud-wrapped peaks of the Middle Kingdom, stalked by vagabonds and monks who had given up on urban life and taken to the hills. There, entranced by lakes and streams, gazing at waterfall, drifting deep into the forests or high into the mountains, they wrote their clearest poetry. They drank wine and shed tears for lost friends. They also sat still in meditation, losing themselves, dissolving their minds into the peaks, becoming part of the land itself.

Instead, there is just this. Boundless. Perfect. Fully realized, fulfilled. Totally accomplished already. You. You yourself. Forever this. If you don’t feel the love, if you’re not quite getting it yet, then no worries. All of us will. We surely will.

So why is emptiness about love? It sounds more like the absence of anything at all, including love. There are two possible answers here. The first is that our human response to finding this basic emptiness is an eruption of joy. It triggers a state of blessedness. It’s like finding that all our life has ever been is an unconditional goodness. Somehow, stripped of all its show and disguises, bare existing itself is an unalloyed goodness. As if the most basic reality of all, beneath and behind every other, is a total absence, and to touch or taste it is to find the ultimate relief from all suffering. It is to find a truth that can’t be reduced or damaged or corrupted in any way. And it is to find that it is the ultimate core of our being. All else — all our life — is secondary.

Notes on Complexity

Cover of Notes on Complexity
Author — Neil Theise
Finished — 2024-10-29

It felt significant to proceed through a big-ideas science book like this and grapple with it the whole way, in light of other reading and thinking I’ve done myself on the wide range of topics it presents. Making a point of taking notes while I read, treating it as an interactive process that makes a permanent mark, has been a major development for 2024. Compare this heap of notes to what remains of, say, my 2003 read-through of The Selfish Gene: a vague sense that it was a great, life-changing book and that genetics is really important.

As typed up on the flight back from Silicon Valley, where I discovered and bought this portable volume at Kepler’s Books.

Not sure I understand this definition of complexity even a little; it’s the “edge of chaos” where stability and chaos “pull in opposite directions”, but it’s actually more unpredictable than chaos?? And how can a computer simulation with the same starting conditions “never be predicted”?? How does a different outcome arise each time?

Argument that there’s no such thing as top-down control, ever: all interactions are local.

Systems need a little randomness to reach into the adjacent possible: consider this for your own life!

Cells move by “aiming” existing Brownian motion, not by moving per se!?

Flight attendant gives a mischievous smile while asking, ラーメンなどは召し上がりますか?

From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever rose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

She called me Van-sama and invited me through the galley where all the ladies were working, to use the opposite bathroom.

I’m not convinced that the randomness of quantum fluctuations is, complexity-wise, the same as the randomness of ants not following the same trail… but maybe kind of. I can sort of see how each level “uses” randomness to achieve enough interestingness to build up to the next level.

I’m not convinced of the Copenhagen interpretation and the way it centers consciousness, but I see how consciousness is what makes quantum world splitting “feel” random. It’s just an interpretation after all, solving the Schrödinger equation in another way, right? Still I’m with Tegmark and Carroll on what’s really going on.

I do appreciate the reminder of everything emerging from spacetime itself, as all one vast whole. Zen indeed.

Getting a bit woo with the holarchy argument here, unnecessarily if you ask me. The universe can be purely physical and still a living whole, buddy, without complaining about “western biases”.

Here we get to zen: interdependence, impermanence, and emptiness.

Emptiness for me is about how everything emerges from, and ultimately equates out to, zero.

Idealism: the universe emerges out of a grand whole Consciousness, and out of that emerge our little local consciousnesses. Maybe! Kinda still seems to be shifting the problem to a different level tho.

Thinking again about decoherence, and starting to understand it as a ramp depending on scale, which quite rapidly slams into a maximum where fields appear to reduce to points (thus settling which branch you’re in); but below that scale they can remain wavy. “Randomness is what branching feels like.”

Infinitely throat-clearing ojisan

Thinking again about the mathematical universe hypothesis, in light of Godel’s mathematical platonism: Does each universe comprise both rules (code) and conditions (data)? Like, there can just be some constants defined at the front of the file for conditions, right?

As typed up after landing, at baggage claim and such.

Not sure I like this invocation of Gödel to claim that “intuition” is as important as science and mathematics, or that the Copenhagen interpretation is inescapably true.

Also thinking about the way the world unfolded in real life in the 20th century (Godel’s long escape from Austria) but unfolds online now (Trump’s campaign and MSG rally today)

I don’t know how I feel about this suggestion that because of decoherence, we can’t measure things and do experiments well enough to understand the universe, so we need “metaphysics” instead.

I do appreciate the illustration of how our universe needed a stack of such narrowly complexity-compatible infrastructure. Most mathematical structures probably don’t give rise to much of interest?

Plenty in here about the Eternal tho, which I’m enjoying. Taking it in that light without fuzzy claims about mapping to science, I’m on board.

And as handwritten while waiting for my driving test at the Samezu Licensing Center, where no electronic devices are allowed.

I appreciate the complementary view of science, philosophy, and spirituality including Zen, for personal spiritual purposes.

I don’t buy the idea that “Consciousness” is somehow prior to physical existence, as it doesn’t seem to solve infinite regress problems (which Tegmark does more satisfyingly) and it smells like trying to bend science to confirm ideas you find comforting.

リカバリー カバヒコ

Author — 青山美智子
Finished — 2024-10-28
Started — 2024

At the Katsushika Central Library, in the foreign language section looking for children’s books in English for my son, I discovered a display explaining a language learning method called “tadoku” (多読), or “copious reading”. Its principles include proceeding quickly through material that’s easy enough for you to enjoy, not referring to a dictionary when you do encounter unfamiliar words, skipping sections that are too hard, and guiltlessly setting aside anything that you’re not fully enjoying.

That day I set aside the hefty Japanese fantasy novel I’d been struggling through and went to my neighborhood shop Daiwa Books to find something I could proceed through more casually and briskly. Robin Sloan had recently recommended Aoyama’s What You Are Looking for is in the Library, in English translation, so I recognized her name on a new book in the recommendation display near the entrance.

The book comprises five loosely connected short stories revolving around an urban legend about a hippo statue in a local playground: if a part of your body is troubling you, touch the statue on that same part and you’ll be cured. Five people partake in the practice to heal various problems in their lives that are literally or figuratively associated with the brain, the eyes, the ears, et cetera. Each one then experiences a healing process which, of course, was actually about mending relationships, refreshing the perception of the self, or some other motion of the soul.

This is an archetypical example of the trend of modern Japanese “healing” fiction, books meant (and explicitly advertised in train cars and such) to be calming and restorative to the stressed and anxious modern mind. A mental prescription akin to a Spotify playlist to help you study, for better or for worse.

I did appreciate having something written in typical modern colloquial Japanese about modern Japanese people having recognizable everyday problems, if only for the language-learning benefits rather than as a great work of literature. Dashing through this got me back on track with reading Japanese as a smooth and pleasurable activity, and afterward I was much more prepared to finish out that hefty fantasy novel….

Forlesen

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2024-10-13
Started — 2024-10

This may be my favorite Wolfe short story yet. It came with a somewhat infamous reputation from Wolfe circles online, but I couldn’t remember why and can’t seem to dig up any of those discussions now. The blend of Wolfeian mystique, weird religiosity, and absurdly hilarious Kafka/Gilliamesque bureaucracy made for a satisfyingly surreal meal.

Postscript of January 2025 — I watched the television show Severance since reading this story, and just all of a sudden put the two together. Could there be an inspirational connection?

The Lathe of Heaven

Author — Ursula K. Le Guin
Finished — 2024-10-09
Started — 2024-09-29

While in Seattle for work, I met up with my best bookfriend and we walked to the Elliott Bay Bookstore. I invited him to choose any book in the store for me to buy and bring home, and he found Le Guin’s Lavinia. (We had an existing connection over her Always Coming Home, which we’d read through together a few years back.) Not far from it on the shelf was a Library of America compendium of five novels spanning her career and culminating in Lavinia, her last. So I chose that superset and committed to reading through them all. This was the first in the collection, from 1971, a sweet spot in the New Age era that I’d been freshly interested in since reading Anthony’s autobiography in which he eye-rollingly claimed that Le Guin had won a Nebula that was rightfully his; and had been craving more of since discovering Priest’s Inverted World.

In any case, the experience was thrilling from the level of the sculpting of individual sentences, all the way up to the Taoist theme running through the whole thing. I felt the moral questions and frequently paused to contemplate how one might even begin to formulate an algorithm for answering them.

“Come on up with me,” he said. “It’s raining already.” In fact it was, the endless warm drizzle of spring— the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it."

The moral architecture of problems that extend beyond the current universe, or even planet: Is an ordinarily immoral act moral when it shifts the entire existence that generated our moral foundations in the first place?

I need you to the extent that-if your sense of obligation to me as a friend, and to the pursuit of knowledge, and to the welfare of all humanity, isn’t sufficient to keep you here-then I’m willing to compel you to serve a higher cause. If necessary, I’ll obtain an order of Obligatory Ther—of Personal Welfare Constraint. If neces-sary, I’ll use drugs, as if you were a violent psychotic. Your refusal to help in a matter of this importance is, of course, psy-chotic. Needless to say, however, I would infinitely rather have your free, voluntary help, without legal or psychic coercion. It would make all the difference to me."

This imagery:

One of these shops under the ramp was a secondhand store; the sign above the windows said ANTIQUES and a poorly lettered, peeling sign painted on the glass said JUNQUE. There was some squat handmade pottery in one window, an old rocker with a motheaten paisley shawl draped over it in the other, and, scattered around these main displays, all kinds of cultural litter: a horseshoe, a hand-wound clock, something enigmatic from a dairy, a framed photograph of President Eisenhower, a slightly chipped glass globe containing three Ecuadorian coins, a plastic toilet-seat cover decorated with baby crabs and seaweed, a well-thumbed rosary, and a stack of old hi-fi 45 rpm records, marked “Gd Cond,” but obviously scratched. Just the sort of place, Orr thought, where Heather’s mother might have worked for a while. Moved by the impulse, he went in.

These unconventional moments of infatuation:

“This is Heather Lelache,” said a soft, suspicious alto. An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. “Hello,” he said again.

He liked the way she began her fierce, scornful sentences so often with a weak, conciliatory “well.” She cut the ground out from under them before they ever got going, let them hang unsupported in the void. She had courage, great courage.

The Safe-Deposit Box

Author — Greg Egan
Finished — 2024-10
Started — 2024

A little too dualist, “ghost-in-the-machine” for me, though there’s a bit of believable Permutation City dust theory in the mechanics of how the consciousness-untethering works. A philosophical sketch that was worth following along on. You could make a movie out of it.

The Caress

Author — Greg Egan
Finished — 2024-10
Started — 2024

What made us so fixated on “art-crime” in the 90s? This story, se7en, Bowie’s “Outside”, and so on. For some reason we thought that what we ought to be afraid of was the disintegration of restraint in creative expression, and that the scariest villains were going to be brilliant and well-resourced artists!?

Blood Sisters

Author — Greg Egan
Finished — 2024-10
Started — 2024

A fine thought experiement in scientific and medical ethics, with a bit of the grimy 90s Egan edge.

Inverted World

Cover of Inverted World
Author — Christopher Priest
Finished — 2024-09-28
Started — 2024-09-14

After my reread of Bio of an Ogre, I was in the mood to better understand the New Age era of SF, and to find better specimens of its wild and challenging explorations of possible universes than Anthony. I had never heard of this book, nor of Priest himself, but upon hearing the briefest introduction decided that I ought to plunge in before learning anything further. As with music, it seems that somehow the 1970s just keep on giving.

Reading this over a Mexican burger at Brave in Kanamachi ended up being one of the more vivid reading experiences I’ve had, enshrined alongside The Source of Magic on the plane to San Jose as a kid, Children of the Mind in the De Pere bunk bed, A Fire Upon the Deep in Ballard after getting my wisdom teeth out, and so on. I look forward to the stores of pleasure waiting for me in the rest of Priest’s corpus. I particularly enjoy the mental state of being led through an aesthetically potent world, feeling just at the edge of having any idea of what’s going on, but trusting that something coherent is, in fact, going on.

Bio of an Ogre

Cover of Bio of an Ogre
Author — Piers Anthony
Finished — 2024-09-14
Started — 2024-08-12

A lightly edited account from messages to a dear book-friend, on why I worked through a distant reread of this book over the course of a couple months’ worth of nights waiting for my kid to fall asleep.

So I’m semi-hate-rereading Piers Anthony’s autobiography

Because it was the first memoir I ever read, at probably about age 11, and I wanted to do a bit of personal archaeology on that time

(screenshots of the 1969 Nebula incident)

🙄

The whole book is a heap of grievances spanning from “one time I got in this argument with a guy in the line to pick up our kids at school” to “Le Guin stole my Nebula”; boasts of what a genius he is but in a world where nobody is smart enough to recognize it; and non-sequitur objectification of women

All the same, I can’t help being compelled by the stories of his upbringing and early struggles as a writer — getting thousands of words out per day, in pencil on a clipboard on his lap while wrangling his infant daughter; adding another yet-unsold novel to the pile, while his wife worked to support the family for another month…

Getting in disputes in fanzines and writers’ conferences; it’s heady sci-fi new wave era stuff

Plus, he’s the guy who introduced me to fiction not-strictly-for-kids, which will always be a warm association

Remembering going on my first “long” flight at 9 years old, Chicago to San Jose, and my brother-in-law put his The Source of Magic in my hand to read on the plane

Which I did, the entire way, prolly accompanied by unlimited 7-Up or whatever

Later on, my dad brought me to Father Steve, the “cool” priest at our church, and prodded me to tell him who my favorite author was. “…Piers Anthony…”, at which he perked up and started telling me all about the other authors I should get into next. Not long after, he had a huge box of sci-fi for me, insisting I take the whole thing home and enjoy it.

It was an intimidating collection of books, and while I looked at them and flipped through them a lot, I only really got into a small fraction of them. I didn’t have the attention span, especially versus all the other entertainments of the early 90s, for much that was deeper than Xanth.

In retrospect, he recognized Anthony as an experimental 60s–70s new wave guy, and I knew him as an 80s settled, formulaic fantasy potboiler guy

Sure wish I had that few shelves worth of books now, tho

Or even that I could remember most of what was on it

Matter

Cover of Matter
Author — Iain M. Banks
Finished — 2024-09-14
Started — 2024-06-08

Banks is a heavy meal, which I’m always glad to have enjoyed but reluctant to enjoy more than one of within the span of a year or two. The idea density is satisfyingly high, and I enjoyed a number of moments of staring off into space, savoring an evocative, galaxy-scale notion. But I did once again find myself wishing that the ever-building tension was toward something deeper, more universally philosophical, than the human adventure it ended up as. It does seem to me that Banks writes “true” sf, in a galaxy that is likely to really be out there and operating according to these principles in some corner of the greater multiverse.

ひらやすみ 5

Finished — 2024-06-20

Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Cover of Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Author — Max Tegmark
Finished — 2024-06-04

Third read, this time with a solid foundation of having lived by the philosophy contained within for nearly ten years. Took my time, highlighting passages with particular philosophical or spiritual resonance, and writing many interrogatory notes. This remains the most important book to me, and one I hope to return to again and again.

I Am A Strange Loop

Cover of I Am A Strange Loop
Author — Douglas Hofstadter
Finished — 2024-05-27

Finished this while technically still in the middle of Gödel, Escher, Bach, the message of which this book was conceived to more succinctly and clearly convey. I’d like to spend more of my life in mental modes like Hofstadter seems to inhabit: his particular formula of deep scientific understanding, philosophical import, genuinely warm emotion, and general joie de vivre.

I was especially struck by the arguments and personal stories about identity and even consciousness being distributed across brains (and other substrates) via the influence we impart — a Dawkinsesque “extended phenotype” of the self.

The Vanishing Tower

Author — Michael Moorcock
Finished — 2024-04-15
Started — 2023-01

This one was a bit more of a slog than the other Elric I’ve read so far, but I do have pleasant memories of reading it on my phone in the back of an eight-person van carting two families around Tokyo in the earliest months of our arrival there.

惑星のさみだれ 2

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2024-03-11

The World Before Us

Author — Tom Higham
Finished — 2024-03
Started — 2024-02

Some exhilarating moments of truly being able to imagine the deep history of humanity, especially the simultaneous existence of distinct human species. In particular, I was dizzied by the colliding of history and prehistory in the story of Eugene Dubois who was working in Indonesia to discover human species from millions to hundreds of thousands of years ago, but whose work was interrupted by the Japanese occupation in World War II, and required him to hide specimens until they could be safely studied.

惑星のさみだれ 1

Author — 水上悟志
Finished — 2024-02-09

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

Author — Ben Riggs
Finished — 2024-01-01

This was precisely the book I wanted after Game Wizards: an account that covered the culture, creativity, and business surrounding D&D during the formative era when I discovered and devoured it. I came away with the impression that tabletop roleplaying is such an extraordinarily powerful and important technology that it shone through even the abysmal environment and practices of the company where it was invented.

Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons

Cover of Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons
Author — Jon Peterson
Finished — 2023-12-17

This was quite boring in a welcome way, and just the thing I needed for bedtime listening after establishing the habit with Geddy Lee’s memoir: Interesting enough in its pop-culture storytelling, while also forgiving of drifting off to sleep and having to jump back the next night. It left me craving more history after Gygax’s ouster in 1985, especially about the seemingly explosive 2nd Edition era in the 1990s, when I got into the game.

H.M.S. Surprise

Cover of H.M.S. Surprise
Author — Patrick O’Brian
Finished — 2023-12-13
Started — 2023

Another dose of pleasure, texture, and flavor to be infused into the rest of life. It’s astonishing to think that there are twenty of these.

My Effin’ Life

Cover of My Effin’ Life
Author — Geddy Lee
Finished — 2023-12

What a treasure it is to get to hear directly from the single most influential creative person on my young self. I’m a better person, who’s had a better life, than if this guy hadn’t been there doing his thing. I could listen to him talk about everything, indefinitely.

A Brief History of Earth

Cover of A Brief History of Earth
Author — Andrew H. Knoll
Finished — 2023-11
Started — 2023

I’d still like to understand more about the deep, geological-time history of this planet, especially in light of my suspicion that our planet is very, very weird and lucky. Plate tectonics and our unlikely escape from runaway processes leading to snowball planet; mass extinction events repeatedly failing to wipe the planet; ramifications for the Fermi paradox.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Author — Becky Chambers
Finished — 2023-11

I enjoyed occupying this chamber precisely like I expected to: stories that ask at every turn “what if everyone was flawed yet did their best to care for one another” rather than modern fiction’s usual “what if everyone was flawed and despicable”.

Mostly Harmless

Cover of Mostly Harmless
Author — Douglas Adams
Finished — 2023-10-11
Started — 2023-10-02

From reading this final book when it came out, around age 11, I had an impression of it being darker and sort of resigned, compared to the zaniness of the prior ones. But upon rereading it as an adult, I found it to have a weird kind of hope and peace that fits well with my own understanding of possibility space and the multiverse.

Armageddon

Cover of Armageddon
Author — Bart Ehrman
Finished — 2023-10-11
Started — 2023-05-11

Just continuing my gradual reinterpretation of religious tradition as fascinatingly human history.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Author — Douglas Adams
Finished — 2023-10-01

I was shocked by how immediately compelling and fresh this felt, after the first three novels; especially with my prior memory of the series having the inverse sentiment. What was an unfamiliar and confusing “grown-up” tone back then made for a more mature, warmer, wiser experience this time.

韋国日記 11

Finished — 2023-09-22
Started — 2023-08-12

Ikoku Nikki is complete. I realized in conversation with a friend recently that much of what I love about this manga is that I have come away from it feeling meaningfully better-equipped in my own life. It’s not just entertainment or dwelling in a certain feeling or aesthetic, like much manga is — it’s got a philosophy of its own that’s worth learning from.

Man's Search for Meaning

Author — Viktor Frankl
Finished — 2023-09
Started — 2023-09

Sign me up for the central idea of Logotherapy — that life is not about finding pleasure or even happiness, but meaning.

女の園の星 3

Finished — 2023-08-11
Started — 2023-08

50 Years of Text Games

Cover of 50 Years of Text Games
Author — Aaron A. Reed
Finished — 2023-07-21
Started — 2023-06-17

I so looked forward to reading an entry in this book each night. It offered a warm welcome-home from a hobby subculture I’d been adjacent to since playing and building text games in the 1980s. This is how I want to replace the otaku-lifestyle video games I said farewell to over the past couple of years. Next I’ll go back, comb through the hundreds of games mentioned, and compile a list of titles to try.

Seveneves

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2023-06-15
Started — 2023-04-20

2023 fortress reread. I don’t reread books often but I needed something familiar and guaranteed to be enjoyable, a fortress to return to while otherwise delving many dungeons in other areas of life. I could have set up some elaborate project for choosing just the right book to revisit, but that itself would have been a dungeon. This stood out from the Kindle library screen and before I knew it I was well into it.

It was even more captivating and enjoyable the second time around, and has joined its sibling Anathem on the “personal canon” shelf. Stephenson has both a myth-making mind and a scientific mind, and loves to show us again and again how real heroes and gods, resonant with our spiritual instincts, could come to be in a rational universe.

女の園の星 2

Finished — 2023-05-02
Started — 2023-04-06

Sometimes I forget that I have a sense of humor that can be reached by media; but this series is sparking it repeatedly.

Post Captain

Author — Patrick O’Brian
Finished — 2023-04-16
Started — 2023-01-14

An ordinary good book is pleasurable while you read it. But O’Brian seems to be able to create an experience that continues to deploy enjoyment throughout the day, as you reflect back on it. The echo of having read it last night, and the promise of getting to read it again tonight, infuses life itself with additional texture and flavor.

女の園の星 1

Finished — 2023-04-05
Started — 2023-03-16

Every panel is a micro-masterpiece of warmth and quiet hilarity.

What’s Our Problem?

Author — Tim Urban
Finished — 2023-03-26
Started — 2019-09

I agree with most of the points in the book, but spent most of the book frustrated by how the points were made. Given the argument of the whole text, I expected more nuance, complexity, and compassion throughout.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Author — Douglas Adams
Finished — 2023-03-26
Started — 2023-01-10

Rereading this series along with my cousin Steve, after last reading it together in 1992. This story is so well-worn in my mind, through rereads, the Infocom game, the television show, and so on; that I barely noticed it going by. The theme that emerges for me as an adult reader is the absurd contrast between the overwhelming grandiosity of reality and the idiotic banality of life in it. The book itself is wry and hip, while no character is more than incidentally admirable; from clueless Earthlings to vastly powerful extra-dimensional beings.

韋国日記 10

Finished — 2023-03-15
Started — 2023-02-13

Ikoku Nikki is quickly becoming an emblem of what I want manga to be. Each character is treated with love. Each scene is handled with grace. The entire stack of books exudes poetry and warmth. The message is delivered again and again: the world is hard and absolutely worth it.

If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare

Author — Robin Hanson, et alii
Finished — 2023-03-13T00:00:11-07:00
Started — 2023-03-11

Mostly glad I read this paper behind the popular grabby aliens model in order to find elements which my disagreement with generates ideas for a fiction project I’m pursuing. Most centrally — I sure do philosophically dislike the principle of mediocrity, and I don’t at all buy that expanding into the galaxy ends up looking like a worthwhile thing to do for advanced civilizations.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: The Nitpicks of Power

Author — Bret Devereaux
Finished — 2023-02-04
Started — 2023-01

This series developed quite a bit my understanding of wanting stories to feel grounded in reality and like they are made of consequences. For me it completes a sort of trilogy of critiques of modern Tolkien screen adaptations, including Lindsay Ellis’s series about the Hobbit films and Moviewise’s video about the main Jackson trilogy.

メタモルフォーゼの縁側 5

Finished — 2023-01-23
Started — 2023-01-04

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe — Space, Time and Motion

Author — Sean Carroll
Finished — 2023-01-13
Started — 2022-12-05

For decades I’ve been reading physics books that purport to explain the nature of the universe without including inscrutable equations, but that end up requiring the reader to trust that the math undeniably and elegantly leads to this or that conclusion. It came gradually clear that in order to feel the significance of what we know, one really needs to understand the math at least somewhat, not just stories about the math and the people who discovered it. This book is the first of a promised trilogy from Sean Carroll, who was already one of my favorite science explainers. I appreciate his willingness to at least sometimes start from the most fundamental principles of what we know rather than defaulting to telling the historical sequence of who discovered what when and then who later found something more fundamental. The idea of the series is to cater to people who want to make the effort to understand the math, but don’t plan to study it at an academic or professional level. That’s me! After reading this I feel a dramatically deeper understanding of what is going on in the universe than any physics book has ever given me, and understanding the universe is one of my elementary particles of meaning.

メタモルフォーゼの縁側 4

Finished — 2023-01-04
Started — 2022-12-22

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Author — Douglas Adams
Finished — 2023

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. The darkness and cynicism about humanity came through much more strongly for me this time, and while the experience was enjoyable I found myself left wondering, “so what do you propose we do about it, then?”

Life, the Universe, and Everything

Author — Douglas Adams
Finished — 2023

2023 re-read with Cousin Steve. This was my favorite as a kid in the 90s, which is unsurprising given the surreal wackiness.

The Weird of the White Wolf

Author — Michael Moorcock
Finished — 2022-12-30
Started — 2022-12

Felt the crustiness more prominently in this volume of some of the oldest Elric stories. The iconic imagery, esoteric mythos, and personal significance offset the grim nihilism. It does feel like delving to the primal roots of Elden Ring, Shin Megami Tensei, and of course a thousand D&D campaigns.

メタモルフォーゼの縁側 3

Finished — 2022-12-21
Started — 2022-11-23

The Fortress of the Pearl

Author — Michael Moorcock
Finished — 2022-12
Started — 2022-11

Came back to my almost lifelong aspirations to get into Moorcock, ignited probably around 1989 when I saw my brother’s copy of The Cornelius Chronicles. I had tried once during a college librarygoing stint in 2003, then again upon visiting the prodigious Moorcock section at Powell’s in 2004, and then once again while making my way through Matthew Colville’s back catalog of videos about the history of gaming and geekery in 2021. The new Elric Saga omnibus editions are precisely what I needed to navigate the absurd tangle of titles and revisions. The story itself, being chronologically early but written much later, was refreshingly mature and thoughtful while still having the same surreally hip fantasy aesthetic. The Dream Realms in particular, and Elric’s passage through them, seem to be well-crafted allegories for common thought traps and how to avoid them.

メタモルフォーゼの縁側 2

Finished — 2022-11-22
Started — 2022-11-04

メタモルフォーゼの縁側 1

Finished — 2022-11-01

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Cover of A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
Author — Becky Chambers
Finished — 2022-11
Started — 2022-10-26

I needed something comfortable after the harrowing trek through Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past. This science-feelings story seemed to build upon the argument Graeber puts forth in The Dawn of Everything — namely that human societies are wildly weird and flexible, with no single correct or natural configuration. Reading that primed me to be more willing to believe in the post-gluttony solarpunk utopia it presents, though heck if I know how we might get there peacefully.

ひらやすみ 4

Finished — 2022-10
Started — 2022-10-16

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Author — Becky Chambers
Finished — 2022-10
Started — 2022-10-07

Death’s End

Finished — 2022-10
Started — 2022-08

ひらやすみ 2

Finished — 2022-09-24
Started — 2022-06-29

The Dark Forest

Finished — 2022-08
Started — 2022-07-25

The Three-Body Problem

Finished — 2022-07-25

The Dawn of Everything

Finished — 2022-07-10
Started — 2022-03-09

The Coddling of the American Mind

Finished — 2022-07-10
Started — 2022-06-2

ひらやすみ 1

Finished — 2022-06-28
Started — 2022-06-21

韋国日記 9

Finished — 2022-06-16
Started — 2022-05-29

What to Remember Upon Waking

Author — David Whyte
Finished — 2022-05-21
Started — 2020-06-28

A Brief History of Earth

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-07-23

韋国日記 8

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022

韋国日記 7

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-04-16

ひらやすみ 3

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-09-25

Time Management for Mortals

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-08

How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen

Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-08

A Closed and Common Orbit

Author — Becky Chambers
Finished — 2022
Started — 2022-04-19

Something Deeply Hidden

Finished — 2021-09-20

偉国日記 1

Finished — 2021-09-18
Started — 2021-09-14

Hunt, Gather, Parent

Author — Michaeleen Doucleff
Finished — 2021-08-15
Started — 2021-04-11

Life Unfolding

Author — Jamie A. Davies
Finished — 2021-07-19
Started — 2017-07-14

Return to the Whorl

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2021-07-09
Started — 2021-03

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 7

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-05-01
Started — 2021-04-01

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 8

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-05
Started — 2021-05-01

Sailor on the Seas of Fate

Author — Michael Moorcock
Finished — 2021-04-04
Started — 2020-12-31

Caffeine

Author — Michael Pollan
Finished — 2021-04-04
Started — 2021-03

ハローメランコリック! 3

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-04-01
Started — 2021-03

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 6

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-03-31
Started — 2021-03-09

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 5

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-03-08
Started — 2021-02-22

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 4

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-02-21
Started — 2021-02-09

My Real Children

Author — Jo Walton
Finished — 2021-02-20
Started — 2021-02-13

Not Dead Yet

Author — Phil Collins
Finished — 2021-02-11
Started — 2021-01-30

ファイブスター物語 13

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2021-02-06
Started — 2019-01

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 3

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-02-01
Started — 2021-02-08

Atomic Habits

Author — James Clear
Finished — 2021-02
Started — 2021-01-29

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 2

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-01-31
Started — 2021-01-25

2DK、G-ペン、目覚まし時計 1

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-01-24
Started — 2021-01-20

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 7

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2021-01-18
Started — 2021-01-17

ハローメランコリック! 2

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-01-17
Started — 2021-01-15

ハローメランコリック! 1

Author — 大沢やよい
Finished — 2021-01-15
Started — 2021-01-14

欠けた月とドーナッツ 2

Author — 雨水 汐
Finished — 2021-01
Started — 2020-01-03

A Promised Land

Author — Barack Obama
Finished — 2021-01
Started — 2020-11-17

A Memory Called Empire

Author — Arkady Martine
Finished — 2021
Started — 2020-10-06

韋国日記 6

Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

韋国日記 5

Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

韋国日記 4

Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

韋国日記 3

Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

韋国日記 2

Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

The Will to Battle

Author — Ada Palmer
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021-08-20

The Gnostic Gospels

Author — Elaine Pagels
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

The Code Breaker

Author — Walter Isaacson
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

Termination Shock

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021

Perhaps the Stars

Author — Ada Palmer
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021-10-31

Be Bilingual — Practical Ideas for Multilingual Families

Author — Annika Bourgogne
Finished — 2021
Started — 2021-01

Elric of Melniboné

Author — Michael Moorcock
Finished — 2020-12
Started — 2020-12-19

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 6

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-11
Started — 2020-11

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 5

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-11
Started — 2020-11-21

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 4

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-10-28
Started — 2020-11-20

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 3

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-10-25
Started — 2020-10-27

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 2

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-10-19
Started — 2020-10-25

ルミナス=ブルー 2

Author — 岩見 樹代子
Finished — 2020-10-15
Started — 2020-09-30

たとえとどかぬ糸だとしても 1

Author — tMnR
Finished — 2020-10-15
Started — 2020-10-19

One Blade of Grass

Author — Henry Shukman
Finished — 2020-10-10
Started — 2020-08-29

In Green’s Jungles

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2020-10-01
Started — 2020-05-25

ルミナス=ブルー 1

Author — 岩見 樹代子
Finished — 2020-09-29
Started — 2020-09-23

欠けた月とドーナッツ 1

Author — 雨水 汐
Finished — 2020-09-22
Started — 2020-09-11

徒然日和 3

Author — 葉室圭
Finished — 2020-09
Started — 2020-08-28

徒然日和 2

Author — 葉室圭
Finished — 2020-08-28
Started — 2020-08-23

放浪息子 5

Author — 志村貴子
Finished — 2020-08-24
Started — 2020

徒然日和 1

Author — 葉室圭
Finished — 2020-08-23
Started — 2020-08-03

The Precipice

Author — Toby Ord
Finished — 2020-08-22
Started — 2020-06-28

Homestuck — Part 4

Author — Andrew Hussie
Finished — 2020-08-22
Started — 2020-08-14

Homestuck — Part 3

Author — Andrew Hussie
Finished — 2020-08-13
Started — 2020-07-25

Becoming Stronger

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-08
Started — 2020-06

Homestuck — Part 2

Author — Andrew Hussie
Finished — 2020-07-24
Started — 2019

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Philosopher’s Stone

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-07-20
Started — 2020-07-05

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Last Enemy

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-07-05
Started — 2020-06-26

Hermione Jean Granger and the Phoenix’s Call

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-06-26
Started — 2020-10-06

Mere Goodness

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-06
Started — 2020-03

On Blue’s Waters

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2020-05
Started — 2020-05

メイドインアビス 5

Author — つくしあきひと
Finished — 2020-04-09
Started — 2019-11-19

Conscious

Author — Annaka Harris
Finished — 2020-04
Started — 2020-03

Mere Reality

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-03
Started — 2020-02-23

Far and Wide

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2020-02-25
Started — 2020-02

The Machine in the Ghost

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-02-22
Started — 2020-01-16

放浪息子 3

Author — 志村貴子
Finished — 2020-02-11
Started — 2019-02-10

放浪息子 2

Author — 志村貴子
Finished — 2020-02-10
Started — 2019-02-06

放浪息子 1

Author — 志村貴子
Finished — 2020-02-06
Started — 2019-02-01

Running on Empty

Author — Jonice Webb
Finished — 2020-02
Started — 2020-02-14

Far and Near

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2020-02
Started — 2020-02

Permutation City

Author — Greg Egan
Finished — 2020-01-21
Started — 2019-12-09

The Catholic Church — A History

Author — William R. Cook
Finished — 2020-01-18
Started — 2019-12-11

How to Actually Change Your Mind

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2020-01-16
Started — 2019-12-11

英雄伝説 零の軌跡 Evolution

Finished — 2020-01-11
Started — 2015-10-01
Platform — PlayStation Vita

Far and Away

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2020-01
Started — 2020-01

放浪息子 4

Author — 志村貴子
Finished — 2020
Started — 2020-02-11

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Iron, How Did They Make It?

Author — Bret Devereaux
Finished — 2020
Started — 2020

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Bread, How Did They Make It?

Cover of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: Bread, How Did They Make It?
Author — Bret Devereaux
Finished — 2020
Started — 2020

I believe this was my introduction to ACoUP and its delightful blend of accessibility and academic rigor. This marked a renewed interest for me in getting to know the people of history.

Map and Territory

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2019-12-10
Started — 2019-11-22

Exodus from the Long Sun

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-12-01
Started — 2019-11-02

Xenoblade 2 黄金の国イーラ

Finished — 2019-11-11
Started — 2019-09-22
Platform — Nintendo Switch

Blueprint for Armageddon

Author — Dan Carlin
Finished — 2019-11-11
Started — 2017

Caldé of the Long Sun

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-11-01
Started — 2019-08-31

A Guide to the Good Life

Author — William B. Irvine
Finished — 2019-10-29
Started — 2019-11-22

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Shadows of Death

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2019-10-05
Started — 2019-09-06

Xenoblade 2

Finished — 2019-09-22
Started — 2018-11-10
Platform — Nintendo Switch

Fond memories of semi-impulsively buying a Switch in Shinjuku, much like many console purchases before, and sneaking Xeno time during baby naps on our long stay in Tokyo. Lost interest for half a year, much like the first Xenoblade, then got way back into it during a hectic time at work that called for some mindless JRPG decompression.

Ryuutama — Natural Fantasy RPG

Author — Okada Atsuhiro
Finished — 2019-09-06
Started — 2019-09-01

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Professor’s Games

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2019-09-06
Started — 2019-07-25

Lake of the Long Sun

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-08-31
Started — 2019-08-10

Digital Minimalism

Author — Cal Newport
Finished — 2019-08-22
Started — 2019-08-14

Collapse

Author — Jared Diamond
Finished — 2019-08-13
Started — 2019-06-25

Nightside the Long Sun

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-08-09
Started — 2019-07-31

Haskell Programming from First Principles

Author — Christopher Allen and Julie Moronuki
Finished — 2019-08
Started — 2018-10-21

Castle of Days

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-08
Started — 2019-05

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and the Methods of Rationality

Author — Eliezer Yudkowsky
Finished — 2019-07-25
Started — 2019-05-25

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2019-07-21
Started — 2019-06-03

Always Coming Home

Author — Ursula K. Le Guin
Finished — 2019-05-21
Started — 2019-03-04

The Fabric of Reality

Author — David Deutsch
Finished — 2019-03-29
Started — 2019-03-01

Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass

Author — Geddy Lee
Finished — 2019-03-23
Started — 2019-03-09

Undertale

Finished — 2019-03-20
Started — 2019-03-17
Platform — Macintosh

Some Remarks

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2019-03-03
Started — 2019-02-16

The Castle of the Otter

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2019-03
Started — 2019-03-02

The Big Picture

Author — Sean Carroll
Finished — 2019-02-25
Started — 2018-10-14

The Rise and Fall of DODO

Author — Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland
Finished — 2019-01-07
Started — 2018-12-18

Homestuck — Part 1

Author — Andrew Hussie
Finished — 2019
Started — 2019

The Fifth Head of Cerberus

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2018-12-26
Started — 2018-12-16

The Urth of the New Sun

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2018-12-14
Started — 2018-10-22

メイドインアビス 4

Author — つくしあきひと
Finished — 2018-11-19
Started — 2018-11-26

メイドインアビス 3

Author — つくしあきひと
Finished — 2018-11-10
Started — 2018-11-03

メイドインアビス 2

Author — つくしあきひと
Finished — 2018-11-02
Started — 2018-06-24

Debt — the First 5,000 Years

Author — David Graeber
Finished — 2018-10-13
Started — 2018-09-10

How Jesus Became God

Author — Bart Ehrman
Finished — 2018-10-12
Started — 2018-10-04

Mindfulness in Plain English

Author — Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Finished — 2018-10-04
Started — 2018-02-01

ファイブスター物語 12

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-09-08
Started — 2018-06-03

Why We Sleep

Author — Matthew Walker
Finished — 2018-09-08
Started — 2018-08-10

Rising Strong

Author — Brené Brown
Finished — 2018-07-26
Started — 2018-07-12

Seven Surrenders

Author — Ada Palmer
Finished — 2018-07-25
Started — 2018-02-27

A Queer History of the United States

Author — Michael Bronski
Finished — 2018-06-24
Started — 2018-06-16

メイドインアビス 1

Author — つくしあきひと
Finished — 2018-06-23
Started — 2018-05-30

Lost Connections

Author — Johann Hari
Finished — 2018-06-15
Started — 2018-05-30

ファイブスター物語 11

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-06-03
Started — 2018-05-01

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

Author — Daniel Dennett
Finished — 2018-05-23
Started — 2018-05-10

The World Until Yesterday

Author — Jared Diamond
Finished — 2018-05-01
Started — 2018-04-15

ファイブスター物語 10

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-04-26
Started — 2018-04-16

ファイブスター物語 9

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-04-15
Started — 2018-04-09

Self-Compassion

Author — Kristin Neff
Finished — 2018-04-15
Started — 2017-01-06

Triggers

Author — Marshall Goldsmith
Finished — 2018-04-14
Started — 2018-04-11

The Story of Earth

Author — Robert M. Hazen
Finished — 2018-04-10
Started — 2018-04-06

ファイブスター物語 8

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-04-08
Started — 2018-04-01

Enlightenment Now

Author — Steven Pinker
Finished — 2018-04-04
Started — 2018-02-26

ファイブスター物語 7

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2018-03-31
Started — 2018-03-25

The 5 Love Languages

Author — Gary Chapman
Finished — 2018-03-18
Started — 2018-02-24

Why Buddhism Is True

Author — Robert Wright
Finished — 2018-02-26
Started — 2018-02-04

This book encapsulates the essential messages of a heap of evolutionary psychology and mindfulness books I’d added to my personal canon over the past several years. Now I can just recommend this one brilliant book for that whole complex of ideas.

Too Like the Lightning

Author — Ada Palmer
Finished — 2018-02-25
Started — 2017-12-27

Braving the Wilderness

Author — Brené Brown
Finished — 2017-12-24
Started — 2017-12-11

“Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Stop scouring people’s faces for evidence that you’re not enough. You will always find it because you’ve made that your goal. True belonging and self-worth are not goods; we don’t negotiate their value with the world. The truth about who we are lives in our hearts. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.”

The Gene

Author — Siddharth Mukherjee
Finished — 2017-12-15
Started — 2017-11-24

Genetics and evolutionary biology might be the most deeply mysterious and strange field of study there is. I sort of resent that all this bizarre and profound discovery about the origins and mechanisms of life was going on while I was in school, but I learned nothing of it until I was an adult choosing books for myself.

The System of the World

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2017-12-10
Started — 2017-11-23

Thus concludes the Baroque Cycle. This was the last of his novels that I hadn’t read: an eight-volume, three-thousand-page opus that dominated my fiction consumption for a year and a half. Visiting the Metropolitan museum and the Tower of London while in the midst of it made the thing come alive. It’s good!

The All-or-Nothing Marriage

Author — Eli J Finkel
Finished — 2017-11-24
Started — 2017-11-20

A survey of the history of the institution of marriage, and a study of what makes a modern marriage work. I appreciated the idea of keeping a “social portfolio” of people who can serve your various emotional needs rather than relying solely on your spouse. And the idea of temporarily descending the mountain of fulfillment during trying times, in order to just focus on surviving together is especially relevant right now!

Currency

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2017-11-22
Started — 2017-09-10

Strangers in Their Own Land

Author — Arlie Russell Hochschild
Finished — 2017-11-18
Started — 2017-10-01

Guess what: Trump voters are human, and they operate according to genuine human emotions. A Berkeley professor explores first-hand how unrestrained pursuit of profit and indifference to human well-being has caused tragedy and despair in places like rural Louisiana, shaping the political opinions of families there.

10% Happier

Author — Dan Harris
Finished — 2017-10-16
Started — 2017-08-14

The Gardener and the Carpenter

Author — Alison Gopnik
Finished — 2017-10-07
Started — 2017-10-03

Parents tend to want to shape their children to a blueprint, like a carpenter. But the best we can hope for is to give them a healthy environment to thrive in and grow their own way, like a gardener.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

Author — Jon Ronson
Finished — 2017-10-02
Started — 2017-09-26

Life 3.0

Author — Max Tegmark
Finished — 2017-09-26
Started — 2017-09-08

This author remains one of my favorite science explainers, this time taking on our possible AI future, which might turn out to be the most consequential thing that has ever happened. I recommend pairing this book with a playthrough of Universal Paperclips.

Solomon’s Gold

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2017-09-09
Started — 2017-06-26

On Tyranny — Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

Author — Timothy Snyder
Finished — 2017-07-23
Started — 2017-07-22

Believe Me — A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens

Author — Eddie Izzard
Finished — 2017-07-21
Started — 2017-06-26

An utterly charming memoir from a truly unique, inspiring, and unflappable soul. Izzard was boldly transgender before it was widely understood, before we had good language for it, certainly before it was cool. And he happens to be a delightful and vivid storyteller, besides. The audio version is positively encrusted with bonus impromptu jokes and digressions and footnotes on footnotes; don’t even consider the text version.

NieR —Automata

Finished — 2017-07-15
Started — 2017-05-25
Platform — PlayStation 4

The Confusion

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2017-06-26
Started — 2017-01-13

Tiny Beautiful Things

Author — Cheryl Strayed
Finished — 2017-06-21
Started — 2017-06-05

The Highly Sensitive Person

Author — Elaine N. Aron
Finished — 2017-06-04
Started — 2017-03-03

Dramatically helpful and satisfying. This book has given me introspective concepts and tools I wish I’d had all my life.

Quiet — The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Author — Susan Cain
Finished — 2017-05-03
Started — 2017-03-28

If you are an introvert or you love one, please read this book. We aren’t broken!

Odalisque

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2017-01-12; 2006-10-02
Started — 2016-12-03; 2006-09-18

Quicksilver

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2016; 2006-09-01
Started — 2016; 2006-08-14

Third attempt to read the Baroque Cycle in ten years.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

Author — Alain de Botton
Finished — 2016-12-14
Started — 2016-11-28

I’ve been timidly edging toward the idea of reading Proust for quite a while now. This helped quite a bit.

King of the Vagabonds

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2016-12-13; 2006-09-18
Started — 2016; 2006-09-01

Essentialism — The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

Author — Greg McKeown
Finished — 2016-10-19

げんしけん 5

Author — Shimoku Kio
Finished — 2016-10-18

Deep Work — Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author — Cal Newport
Finished — 2016-10-05

The Spider's War

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2016-09-22

Daring Greatly — How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Author — Brené Brown
Finished — 2016-08-24

Radical Acceptance — Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

Author — Tara Brach
Finished — 2016-08-09

Stories of Your Life and Others

Author — Ted Chiang
Finished — 2016-07-30

Foucault's Pendulum

Author — Umberto Eco
Finished — 2016-04-02

The Millionaire Next Door

Author — Thomas J. Stanley
Finished — 2016-03-29

Heavy Time

Author — C.J. Cherryh
Finished — 2016-02-04

Firewatch

Finished — 2016-02
Started — 2016-02-13

Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture

Finished — 2016-01-31
Started — 2016-01-16

げんしけん 4

Author — Shimoku Kio
Finished — 2016-01-17

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

Finished — 2016-01-09
Started — 2015-12-26

Xenoblade Chronicles X

Finished — 2015-12-26
Started — 2015-12-04
Platform — Wii U

This was not at all what I’d hoped Xeno would become, and much of the depth and mystique that made me such a fan of the previous games just isn’t here. But it’s fantastic at what it does. I eventually got genuinely hooked on exploring its colossal world, meeting its silly inhabitants, and beating up a wide variety of aliens. Much like the first Xenoblade, I find myself a bit homesick for it long after it’s over.

Soma

Finished — 2015-12-05
Started — 2015-11-07
Platform — PlayStation 4

This had some of the most provocative decisions I have ever seen in a game. Not just mundane “whose life do you save” choices, but ones that are genuinely philosophical and that often split our group down the middle.

Ancillary Mercy

Author — Ann Leckie
Finished — 2015-11-16

The Fellowship of the Ring

Author — J.R.R. Tolkien
Finished — 2015-11-13

げんしけん 3

Author — Shimoku Kio
Finished — 2015-10-21

Gather the People — A Simple Honest Approach to Creating Work that People Love, Buy, and Share

Author — Sarah J. Bray
Finished — 2015-10-05

Superintelligence — Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Author — Nick Bostrom
Finished — 2015-09-11

げんしけん 2

Author — Shimoku Kio
Finished — 2015-08-15

Cadence And Slang

Author — Nick Disabato
Finished — 2015-08-15

So Good They Can't Ignore You — Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Author — Cal Newport
Finished — 2015-07-29

Her Story

Finished — 2015-07-19
Started — 2015-07-18
Platform — Macintosh

Seveneves

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2015-05-30

The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

Author — Amanda Palmer
Finished — 2015-05-28

げんしけん 1

Author — Shimoku Kio
Finished — 2015-05-25

越えざるは紅い花

Finished — 2015-05
Started — 2015-04-01
Platform — PlayStation Portable

マホロミ 1

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2015-04-29

Becoming Steve Jobs — The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

Author — Brent Schlender
Finished — 2015-04-28

Project X — Challengers - Seven Eleven

Author — Tadashi Ikuta
Finished — 2015-04-17

ファイブスター物語 リブート 7 THE MAJESTIC STAND 1

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2015-04-06

The New Jim Crow — Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Author — Michelle Alexander
Finished — 2015-03-15

Our Mathematical Universe — My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Author — Max Tegmark
Finished — 2015-03-08

英雄伝説 空の軌跡SC

Finished — 2015-02-22
Started — 2014-11-11
Platform — PlayStation Portable

Thinking With Type

Author — Ellen Lupton
Finished — 2015-02-01

Being Geek — The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Author — Michael Lopp
Finished — 2015-01-29

The Player of Games

Author — Iain M. Banks
Finished — 2015-01-12

The Happiness Hypothesis — Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Author — Jonathan Haidt
Finished — 2015-01-06

Ancillary Sword

Author — Ann Leckie
Finished — 2015-01-02

Numenera

Author — Monte Cook
Finished — 2015-01
Started — 2014-12-19

Ancillary Justice

Author — Ann Leckie
Finished — 2014-11-29

Persona 2 罪

Finished — 2014-11-09
Started — 2011-05-16
Platform — PlayStation Portable

I played the P2 duology out of order, which was actually probably ideal. More late PSX-era graphics, more weird psychology, more Amano Maya, more Persona 2! These games are so emblematic to me of the strange, hip, geeky Japan of the 1990s.

初音ミク Project DIVA F 2nd

Finished — 2014-10-26
Started — 2014-04-16
Platform — PlayStation Vita

I think Project Diva is the perfect artifact to represent the entire Vocaloid phenomenon. So many creative folks’ efforts went into creating it, but my favorite fact about this game is that the motion capture for when Miku plays guitar was done by one of my favorite bands, Gacharic Spin.

フェイト/ステイナイト[レアルタ・ヌア] extra edition

Finished — 2014-10-17
Started — 2013-09-08
Platform — PlayStation 2

The joke was that nobody would want to watch a Japanese visual novel on Twitch. But a few friends ended up immersing ourselves in the day-to-day rhythms of this game together, and developed elaborate inside jokes and rituals for the narrative’s meditatively repetitive nature. I wish Nasu Kinoko was better at editing, though; I like drawn-out pacing but nearly every scene felt about 50% too long!

The Widow's House

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2014-10-14

Among Others

Author — Jo Walton
Finished — 2014-10-10

Nobody Passes — Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity

Author — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Finished — 2014-09-21

Waking Up — A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Author — Sam Harris
Finished — 2014-09-18

ファイブスター物語 リブート THE CHIVALRIES 6

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2014-09-01

How to Live — A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer

Author — Sarah Bakewell
Finished — 2014-07-30

ファイブスター物語 リブート 5 ATROPOS 2

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2014-07-17

Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth

Author — Burton L. Mack
Finished — 2014-06-14

Delusions of Gender — How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference

Author — Cordelia Fine
Finished — 2014-06-09

Consider Phlebas

Author — Iain M. Banks
Finished — 2014-06-08

The Beginning of Infinity — Explanations That Transform the World

Author — David Deutsch
Finished — 2014-04-29

Jhereg

Author — Steven Brust
Finished — 2014-04-12

Hild

Author — Nicola Griffith
Finished — 2014-04-04

ファイブスター物語 リブート 4 ATROPOS 1

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2014-03-11

The Righteous Mind — Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Author — Jonathan Haidt
Finished — 2014-02-06

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Author — Dale Carnegie
Finished — 2014-01-16

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Author — N.K. Jemisin
Finished — 2014-01-01

Gone Home

Finished — 2013-12-24
Started — 2013-12-08
Platform — Macintosh

I am so ready for the generation of mature, intelligent, heartfelt games that this heralds. Played through it with my cousin Steve as a revival of our MacVenture days, then again on my own with commentary, then played through it for H.

The Legend of Heroes — Trails in the Sky

Finished — 2013-12-21
Started — 2013-10-03
Platform — PlayStation Portable

Solid, meat-and-potates, earnestly pre-moe JRPG. Focuses on the experience of traveling around a rich fantasy world, which feels like it existed long before you came along, and discovering the complex relationships between its people and institutions. Doesn’t focus on gimmicks, technology, or unlockable swimsuits for your female party members. The promising beginning to what seems to be a truly epickal series.

Xenoblade Chronicles

Finished — 2013-12-14
Started — 2012-04-21
Platform — Wii

Given how often I find myself wanting to go back and play this again, maybe it should have gotten five stars. The excitement of a brand-new Xeno title that Shishka and I could play together was huge; he’s the one who got me into Xenogears in the first place, so many years ago. The world and much of the story felt appropriately epickal for the Xeno name. The tedium of the back third of the game cost me so much enthusiasm, though.

The Bible Unearthed — Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

Author — Israel Finkelstein
Finished — 2013-12-08

Art and Fear — Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking

Author — David Bayles
Finished — 2013-11-18

The Name of the Rose

Author — Umberto Eco
Finished — 2013-10-26

An Appetite for Wonder — The Making of a Scientist

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2013-10-04

Analogue — A Hate Story

Finished — 2013-09-10
Started — 2013-09-07
Platform — Macintosh

Digital — A Love Story

Finished — 2013-09-06
Started — 2013-09-06
Platform — Macintosh

Bird by Bird — Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Author — Anne Lamott
Finished — 2013-09-06

Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung — A Companion

Author — Stewart Spencer
Finished — 2013-08-10

The Queen's Gambit

Author — Walter Tevis
Finished — 2013-07-15

American Savage — Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

Author — Dan Savage
Finished — 2013-07-09

ファイブスター物語 6

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-07-07

The Tyrant's Law

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2013-06-22

ファイブスター物語 5

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-06-15

The Swerve — How the World Became Modern

Author — Stephen Greenblatt
Finished — 2013-05-30

ファイブスター物語 4

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-05-25

ファイブスター物語 3

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-05-15

ファイブスター物語 2

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-05-11
Started — 2013

ファイブスター物語 1

Author — 永野護
Finished — 2013-04-26
Started — 2013

Going Clear — Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Author — Lawrence Wright
Finished — 2013-03-22

The Looming Tower — Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Author — Lawrence Wright
Finished — 2013-03-21

How Music Works

Author — David Byrne
Finished — 2013-02-26

Makers — The New Industrial Revolution

Author — Chris Anderson
Finished — 2013-02-21

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Author — Daniel Kahneman
Finished — 2013-02-05

The Hobbit

Author — J.R.R. Tolkien
Finished — 2012-12-30

Empire of Liberty — A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

Author — Gordon S. Wood
Finished — 2012-09-14

Dark Souls

Finished — 2012-07-07
Started — 2011-10-05
Platform — PlayStation 3

The King's Blood

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2012-07-05

イエスタデイをうたって 6

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2012-06-22

Roadshow — Landscape with Drums — A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2012-05-24

Shades of Milk and Honey

Author — Mary Robinette Kowal
Finished — 2012-05-23

The Dragon's Path

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2012-05-12

My Freshman Year — What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student

Author — Rebekah Nathan
Finished — 2012-05-02

The Social Conquest of Earth

Author — Edward O. Wilson
Finished — 2012-05-01

Journey

Finished — 2012-04-15
Started — 2012-04-15
Platform — PlayStation 3

メルルのアトリエ ~アーランドの錬金術士3~

Finished — 2012-04-07
Started — 2012-02-11
Platform — PlayStation 3

The Citadel of the Autarch

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2012-03-25

Free Will

Author — Sam Harris
Finished — 2012-03-18

Religion for Atheists — A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

Author — Alain de Botton
Finished — 2012-03-15

The Sword of the Lictor

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2012-02-15

トトリのアトリエ~アーランドの錬金術士2~

Finished — 2012-02-04
Started — 2012-01-14
Platform — PlayStation 3

Steins;Gate HD

Finished — 2012-02-04
Started — 2011-08-25
Platform — iOS

The Rational Optimist — How Prosperity Evolves

Author — Matt Ridley
Finished — 2012-01-31

Columbine

Author — Dave Cullen
Finished — 2012-01-06

The Claw of the Conciliator

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2011-12-31

The Shadow of the Torturer

Author — Gene Wolfe
Finished — 2011-12-19

Lying

Author — Sam Harris
Finished — 2011-12-16

Reamde

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2011-12-15

The Better Angels of Our Nature — Why Violence Has Declined

Author — Steven Pinker
Finished — 2011-12-13

Leviathan Wakes

Author — James S.A. Corey
Finished — 2011-09-09

A Dance with Dragons

Author — George R.R. Martin
Finished — 2011-08-14

CHAOS;HEAD NOAH HD

Finished — 2011-06-27
Started — 2011-05-26
Platform — iOS

デュラララ!! ×1

Author — Ryohgo Narita
Finished — 2011-05-29

The Price of Spring

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2011-05-20

Valkyria Chronicles

Finished — 2011-05-13
Started — 2010-02-08?
Platform — PlayStation 3

Your Inner Fish — A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Author — Neil Shubin
Finished — 2011-05-11

The Hidden Reality — Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

Author — Brian Greene
Finished — 2011-05-01

The Wise Man's Fear

Author — Patrick Rothfuss
Finished — 2011-04-04

Catherine

Finished — 2011-03-20
Started — 2011-02-28
Platform — PlayStation 3

Blankets

Author — Craig Thompson
Finished — 2011-02-24

Writing Without Teachers

Author — Peter Elbow
Finished — 2011-02-14

Guns, Germs and Steel — The Fates of Human Societies

Author — Jared Diamond
Finished — 2010-12-30

CHAOS;HEAD NOAH

Finished — 2010-12-25
Started — 2010-10-28
Platform — PlayStation Portable

God Is Not Great — How Religion Poisons Everything

Author — Christopher Hitchens
Finished — 2010-11-22

Misquoting Jesus — The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Author — Bart D. Ehrman
Finished — 2010-11-10

Persona 4

Finished — 2010-11-07
Started — 2010-08-27; 2010-11-14
Platform — PlayStation 2

The one game that Hiroko and I enthusiastically played through together in its entirety.

The Moral Landscape — How Science Can Determine Human Values

Author — Sam Harris
Finished — 2010-10-20

Letter to a Christian Nation

Author — Sam Harris
Finished — 2010-10-19

The Emperor's New Mind Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics

Author — Roger Penrose
Finished — 2010-10-14

The Grand Design

Author — Stephen Hawking
Finished — 2010-10-04

The Snow Goose

Author — Paul Gallico
Finished — 2010-09-19

The Seven Daughters of Eve — The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry

Author — Bryan Sykes
Finished — 2010-08-23

The Greatest Show on Earth — The Evidence for Evolution

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2010-08-13

The Name of the Wind

Author — Patrick Rothfuss
Finished — 2010-08-02

Ar tonelico 3 世界終焉の引鉄は少女の詩が弾く

Finished — 2010-07-27
Started — 2010-02-22
Platform — PlayStation 3

Impressions; Button Trance: Ar tonelico 3; Addendum: Of Tilia

The Blank Slate — The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Author — Steven Pinker
Finished — 2010-07-02

Shin Megami Tensei — Persona

Finished — 2010-05-15; 2010-06-16
Started — 2010-05-02; 2010-05-15
Platform — PlayStation Portable

An Autumn War

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2010-04-21

Just Six Numbers — The Deep Forces That Shape the Universe

Author — Martin J. Rees
Finished — 2010-03-25

月の影 影の海

Author — Fuyumi Ono
Finished — 2010-02-13

Bayonetta

Finished — 2010-02-07
Started — 2010-01-23
Platform — PlayStation 3

Uncharted 2 — Among Thieves

Finished — 2010-01-25
Started — 2010-01-18
Platform — PlayStation 3

Silent Hill — Shattered Memories

Finished — 2010-01-23
Started — 2010-01-17
Platform — Wii

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン鋼鉄のガールフレンド2nd 1

Author — Fumino Hayashi
Finished — 2010-01-18

MOTHER 2

Finished — 2010-01-16
Started — 2009-12-03
Platform — Game Boy Advance

The Life of the Cosmos

Author — Lee Smolin
Finished — 2009-12-30

Demon's Souls

Finished — 2009-11-12
Started — 2009-10-09
Platform — PlayStation 3

Persona 3 FES

Finished — 2009-09-08
Started — 2008-12-29
Platform — PlayStation 2

Shaman's Crossing

Author — Robin Hobb
Finished — 2009-07-22

夏と花火と私の死体

Author — Otsuichi
Finished — 2009-06-27

eb!コレ エビコレ+ キミキス

Finished — 2009-05-25
Started — 2008-08-25
Platform — PlayStation 2

A Betrayal in Winter

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2009-04-26

パラダイス・キス 1

Author — Ai Yazawa
Finished — 2009-03-13

A Devil's Chaplain — Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2009-02-05

Spin

Author — Robert Charles Wilson
Finished — 2009-01-28

On Writing — A Memoir of the Craft

Author — Stephen King
Finished — 2009-01-19

The Double Helix — A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA

Author — James D. Watson
Finished — 2009-01-13

のだめカンタービレ 3

Author — Tomoko Ninomiya
Finished — 2009-01-09

のだめカンタービレ 2

Author — Tomoko Ninomiya
Finished — 2009-01-04

Braid

Finished — 2009-01-01
Started — 2009-01-01
Platform — PlayStation 3

LittleBigPlanet

Finished — 2009-01
Started — 2008-12
Platform — PlayStation 3

Mana Khemia ~学園の錬金術士たち~ プレミアムボックス 特典 ドラマCD付き

Finished — 2008-5-29
Started — 2007-7-17
Platform — PlayStation 2

Persona 2 罰

Finished — 2008-12-28
Started — 2008-11-13
Platform — PlayStation

The Elements of Typographic Style

Author — Robert Bringhurst
Finished — 2008-12-08

Etrian Odyssey

Finished — 2008-11-01
Started — 2008-07-24
Platform — Nintendo DS

Anathem

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2008-10-16

のだめカンタービレ 1

Author — Tomoko Ninomiya
Finished — 2008-09-11

A Shadow in Summer

Author — Daniel Abraham
Finished — 2008-09-03

How the Mind Works

Author — Steven Pinker
Finished — 2008-08-29

Traveling Music — The Soundtrack to My Life and Times

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2008-05-28

The Masked Rider — Cycling in West Africa

Author — Neil Peart
Finished — 2008-05-11

A Feast for Crows

Author — George R.R. Martin
Finished — 2008-04-29

Ar tonelico 2 世界に響く少女たちの創造詩

Finished — 2008-04-14
Started — 2007-11-01
Platform — PlayStation 2

Button Trance: Ar tonelico 2

A Storm of Swords

Author — George R.R. Martin
Finished — 2008-04-03

A Clash of Kings

Author — George R.R. Martin
Finished — 2008-02-14

A Game of Thrones

Author — George R.R. Martin
Finished — 2008-01-06

20世紀少年 22

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2007ish

True Names... and Other Dangers

Author — Vernor Vinge
Finished — 2007-12-13

Walking on Glass

Author — Iain Banks
Finished — 2007-10-16

Nature Via Nurture — Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

Author — Matt Ridley
Finished — 2007-10-04

The Space Merchants

Author — Frederik Pohl
Finished — 2007-09-09

Writing with Power — Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process

Author — Peter Elbow
Finished — 2007-08-27

A Deepness in the Sky

Author — Vernor Vinge
Finished — 2007-08-15

Hawaii

Author — James A. Michener
Finished — 2007-06-26

Hotel Dusk — Room 215

Finished — 2007-05-24
Started — 2007-05-16
Platform — Nintendo DS

Tales of the South Pacific

Author — James A. Michener
Finished — 2007-03-21

The Language Instinct — How the Mind Creates Language

Author — Steven Pinker
Finished — 2007-02-25

Phoenix Wright — Ace Attorney

Finished — 2007-02-23
Started — 2007-01-31
Platform — Nintendo DS

Summon Night Swordcraft Story

Finished — 2007-01-31
Started — 2007-01-02
Platform — Game Boy Advance

Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones

Finished — 2007-01-02
Started — 2006-09-19
Platform — Game Boy Advance

20世紀少年 21

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2006ish

The Areas of My Expertise

Author — John Hodgman
Finished — 2006-12-31

The Legend of Zelda — Twilight Princess

Finished — 2006-12-10
Started — 2006-11-23
Platform — Wii

The Omnivore's Dilemma — A Natural History of Four Meals

Author — Michael Pollan
Finished — 2006-11-16

Stumbling on Happiness

Author — Daniel Todd Gilbert
Finished — 2006-10-24

The God Delusion

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2006-10-16

Atelier Iris 2 — The Azoth of Destiny

Finished — 2006-09-24
Started — 2006-08-20
Platform — PlayStation 2

The Zen Commandments — Ten Suggestions for a Life of Inner Freedom

Author — Dean Sluyter
Finished — 2006-08-08

Genome — the Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

Author — Matt Ridley
Finished — 2006-08-02

Atelier Iris — Eternal Mana

Finished — 2006-07-29
Started — 2006-06-10
Platform — PlayStation 2

The Fabric of the Cosmos — Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

Author — Brian Greene
Finished — 2006-07-01

New Super Mario Bros

Finished — 2006-06-24
Started — 2006-06-13
Platform — Nintendo DS

Ar tonelico 世界の終わりで詩い続ける少女

Finished — 2006-06-10
Started — 2006-02-24
Platform — PlayStation 2

My Ishmael

Author — Daniel Quinn
Finished — 2006-05-09

The Design of Everyday Things

Author — Donald A. Norman
Finished — 2006-05-05

A Million Little Pieces

Author — James J. Frey
Finished — 2006-03-22

A Fire Upon the Deep

Author — Vernor Vinge
Finished — 2006-02-22

Snow Crash

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2006-01-29

Flight of the Dragonfly

Author — Robert L. Forward
Finished — 2006-01-12

SIMPLE2000シリーズ Vol.50 THE 大美人

Finished — 2006
Started — 2006
Platform — PlayStation 2

The people at Pink Godzilla practically made me take this when I bought some other game there, and I can see why. It made for a pretty dumb couple of hours at Shishka’s house.

Power-Up — How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life

Author — Chris Kohler
Finished — 2005ish

20世紀少年 19

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2005ish

20世紀少年 18

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2005ish

20世紀少年 20

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2005ish

Indigo Prophecy

Finished — 2005-11-4
Started — 2005-11-01
Platform — PlayStation 2

Fire from Heaven

Author — Mary Renault
Finished — 2005-11-11

Getting Things Done — The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Author — David Allen
Finished — 2005-10-31

The Elegant Universe — Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

Author — Brian Greene
Finished — 2005-10-06

ELYSION ~永遠のサンクチュアリ~

Finished — 2005-10
Started — 2005-10
Platform — Dreamcast

サクラ大戦V ~さらば愛しき人よ~ 通常版

Finished — 2005-09-10
Started — 2005-08-16
Platform — PlayStation 2

Life of Pi

Author — Yann Martel
Finished — 2005-08-19

The Diamond Age — or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Author — Neal Stephenson
Finished — 2005-07-15

Sentimental Graffiti

Finished — 2005-02-21
Started — 2005-01-30
Platform — Segasaturn

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン 鋼鉄のガールフレンド

Finished — 2005
Started — 2005
Platform — Segasaturn

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン 2nd Impression

Finished — 2005
Started — 2005
Platform — Segasaturn

新世紀エヴァンゲリオン

Finished — 2005
Started — 2005
Platform — Segasaturn

イエスタデイをうたって 5

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2004ish

イエスタデイをうたって 4

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2004ish

The Story of B — An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

Author — Daniel Quinn
Finished — 2004ish

The HAB Theory

Author — Allan W. Eckert
Finished — 2004ish

20世紀少年 17

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2004ish

20世紀少年 16

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2004ish

20世紀少年 15

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2004ish

Xenosaga エピソードII 善悪の彼岸

Finished — 2004-07
Started — 2004-07
Platform — PlayStation 2

Xenosaga Freaks

Finished — 2004-05
Started — 2004-05
Platform — PlayStation 2

The Ancestor's Tale — A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2004

火焔聖母~The Virgin on Megiddo~

Finished — 2004
Started — 2003
Platform — Dreamcast

北へ ~Diamond Dust~

Finished — 2004
Started — 2004
Platform — PlayStation 2

SIMPLE2000シリーズ Vol.31 THE 地球防衛軍

Finished — 2004
Started — 2003-09
Platform — PlayStation 2

羊のうた 7

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 9

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 8

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 7

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 6

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 5

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 4

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 3

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 2

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 18

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 17

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 16

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 15

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 14

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 13

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 12

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 11

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 10

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

モンスター 1

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

20世紀少年 14

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

20世紀少年 13

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

20世紀少年 12

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

20世紀少年 11

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2003ish

Shenmue II

Finished — 2003-08
Started — 2003-07
Platform — Dreamcast

ルームメイトノベル 佐藤由香

Finished — 2003-07
Started — 2003-07
Platform — Dreamcast

Shenmue

Finished — 2003-06
Started — 2003-06
Platform — Dreamcast

Xenosaga

Finished — 2003-03
Started — 2003-03
Platform — PlayStation 2

The Selfish Gene

Author — Richard Dawkins
Finished — 2003

Ishmael — An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

Author — Daniel Quinn
Finished — 2003

零~ZERO~ PlayStation 2 the Best

Finished — 2003
Started — 2002
Platform — PlayStation 2

零 ~紅い蝶~ PlayStation 2 the Best

Finished — 2003
Started — 2003
Platform — PlayStation 2

北へ。White Illumination

Finished — 2003
Started — 2003
Platform — Dreamcast

サクラ大戦 ~熱き血潮に~

Finished — 2003
Started — 2003
Platform — PlayStation 2

Rez

Finished — 2003
Started — 2003
Platform — Dreamcast

羊のうた 6

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

羊のうた 5

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

羊のうた 4

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

羊のうた 3

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

羊のうた 2

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

羊のうた 1

Author — Kei Toume
Finished — 2002ish

ヤサシイワタシ 2

Author — Asa Higuchi
Finished — 2002ish

ヤサシイワタシ 1

Author — Asa Higuchi
Finished — 2002ish

イエスタデイをうたって 3

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2002ish

イエスタデイをうたって 2

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2002ish

イエスタデイをうたって 1

Author — 冬目景
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 9

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 8

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 7

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 6

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 3

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 2

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 10

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 5

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 4

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

20世紀少年 1

Author — 浦沢直樹
Finished — 2002ish

Xenosaga エピソード I 力への意志

Finished — 2002-04-22
Started — 2002-03-04
Platform — PlayStation 2

The announcement of a new Xeno game marked my first phase of fervent video game geekery. I ended up teaming with some folks online to create a guide and script translation.

最終兵器彼女 5

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 7

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 6

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 4

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 3

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 2

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

最終兵器彼女 1

Author — Shin Takahashi
Finished — 2002

The Pillars of Creation

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 2002
Started — 2002

サクラ大戦4 ~恋せよ乙女~

Finished — 2002
Started — 2002
Platform — Dreamcast

サクラ大戦3~巴里は燃えているか~

Finished — 2002
Started — 2002
Platform — Dreamcast

サクラ大戦2 君、死にたもうことなかれ

Finished — 2002
Started — 2002
Platform — Dreamcast

サクラ大戦

Finished — 2002
Started — 2002
Platform — Dreamcast

A personal account of my experiences with Sakura Taisen.

An article about the series that I wrote for HG101.

Final Fantasy VIII

Finished — 2001-04
Started — 2001-03
Platform — PlayStation

Final Fantasy VII

Finished — 2001-03
Started — 2000
Platform — PlayStation

Metal Gear Solid

Finished — 2001
Started — 2001
Platform — PlayStation

Diablo 2 — Lord of Destruction

Finished — 2001
Started — 2001
Platform — Macintosh

Devil May Cry

Finished — 2001
Started — 2001-08-23
Platform — PlayStation 2

CAPCOM VS. SNK 2 MILLIONAIRE FIGHTING 2001

Finished — 2001
Started — 2001
Platform — PlayStation 2

The first video game I ever imported (from good old NCSX). I used to pack up my precious PS2 and bring it to Jon’s apartment so we could play this. Eventually I just moved in with him.

Faith of the Fallen

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 2000ish

Diablo 2

Finished — 2000
Started — 2000
Platform — Macintosh

Chrono Cross

Finished — 2000
Started — 2000
Platform — PlayStation

Soul of the Fire

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 1999ish

Xenogears

Finished — 1999-12
Started — 1999-11
Platform — PlayStation

The Fountainhead

Author — Ayn Rand
Finished — 1998ish

Riven

Finished — 1998-01-08
Started — 1997-12-31
Platform — Windows

Atlas Shrugged

Author — Ayn Rand
Finished — 1998

Wizard's First Rule

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 1997ish

Temple of the Winds

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 1997ish

Stone of Tears

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 1997ish

Blood of the Fold

Author — Terry Goodkind
Finished — 1997ish

Anthem

Author — Ayn Rand
Finished — 1997ish

The Secret of Monkey Island

Finished — 1997?
Started — 1997?
Platform — Windows

Gunstar Heroes

Finished — 1997?
Started — 1997?

Chrono Trigger

Finished — 1997-7
Started — 1997-7-1

Diablo

Finished — 1997
Started — 1997
Platform — Windows

Super Mario RPG

Finished — 1996?
Started — 1996?

Secret of Evermore

Finished — 1996?
Started — 1996?

A Link to the Past

Finished — 1995?
Started — 1995?

Myst

Finished — 1994-04
Started — 1994-04
Platform — Macintosh

Sonic the Hedgehog 3

Finished — 1994-02-06
Started — 1994-02-02

Monkey Island 2 — LeChuck's Revenge

Finished — 1994
Started — 1993-12-25
Platform — Macintosh

Space Quest I — The Sarien Encounter

Finished — 1993?
Started — 1993?
Platform — Macintosh

King's Quest V — Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!

Finished — 1993-10
Started — 1993-10
Platform — Macintosh

King's Quest II — Romancing the Throne

Finished — 1993-07-27
Started — 1993-07
Platform — Macintosh

King's Quest VI — Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow

Finished — 1993-07-12
Started — 1993-06
Platform — Macintosh

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

Finished — 1993-01
Started — 1992-12

Space Quest III — The Pirates of Pestulon

Finished — 1993
Started — 1992-12-25
Platform — Macintosh

Super Mario World

Finished — 1992?
Started — 1992?

Space Quest IV — Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

Finished — 1992?
Started — 1992?
Platform — Macintosh

A Spell for Chameleon

Author — Piers Anthony
Finished — 1991ish

The Source of Magic

Author — Piers Anthony
Finished — 1991