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At first I didn't quite know what I would do with the book, other than read it over and over again. My distrust of history then was still strong, and I wanted to concentrate on the story for its own sake, rather than on the manuscript's scientific, cultural, anthropological, or 'historical' value. I was drawn to the author himself.

— Orhan Pamuk


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READIN

READIN started out as a place for me to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly) how to design a web site.

There has been some mission drift here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of the main things I write about here are reading books, listening to (and playing) music, and watching the movies. Also I write about the work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.

The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.

See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.

READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.

🦋 Ten books

So the ten books that first occur to me as "books that have profoundly influenced my worldview" (whatever those words mean) are, and I posted them in the order that they occurred to me yesterday and today:

  1. Snow (Orhan Pamuk, Turkey 2002)
  2. Bicameral Mind (Jaynes, US 1976)
  3. INFINITE JEST (dfw, US 1996)
  4. El arte de la resurrección (Hernán Rivera Letelier, Chile 2010)
  5. Bleak House (Dickens, UK 1853)
  6. The Autograph Man (Smith, UK 2002)
  7. Manituana (Wu Ming, Italy 2007)
  8. Debt (Graeber, US 2011)
  9. Regeneration Through Violence (Slotkin, US 1973)
  10. The Unknown University (Bolaño, Chile 2011)
(9 should probably have an asterisk by it, I don't think I ever actually read the whole book.)

I'm happy with this list. I would recommend any of these books highly, were a friend to come to me looking for reading material. Maybe 9. should trade places with #11, "Blindness" by Saramago. I have blogged many of these reads, not all.

posted afternoon of May 11th, 2020: Respond
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