Mac is (Temporarily) Dead

This post was written yesterday around 9 PM.

I'm actually writing this post. Pen to paper. You're reading the typed up version. I've never really been a fan of pen-to-paper writing. When it comes to the mechanical process of when I do most of my work, I'm actually more of a typer than a writer. Being able to type provides you with so many luxuries. Spell check, for one – I most definitely misspelled "luxuries" up there. The ability to easily erase and move around words is nice, too.

My computer's at the Apple Store. There's a very good chance that the logic board – which contains a lot of parts that make a computer (especially Macs) tick – might be dead. No worries, though. I'm still covered under AppleCare for a few more months. On top of that, all my stuff is backed up on a hard drive sitting no more than a foot away from the notebook I'm writing this on.

The problem, though, is that it could take up to seven days for me to get it back. And it's my only computer. So in the meantime, I have no easy way to actually do stuff with that backup – at least not on any random whim.

I still have my iPod touch, not to mention a working internet connection. So I can still keep up on emails and stuff, though doing something text intensive – like, say, writing a blog post – would prove difficult.

I feel like I should be frustrated, but I'm not nearly as annoyed as I feel like I ought to be. If that makes any sense. If anything, I'm thinking of this as a sort of an experiment. How well can my iPod usurp my computer in day to day use? Further: how will not having a computer affect my life?

I'll definitely be grateful when I have a computer once again. But for now, I'm curious about how this will go.

In the meantime, there's a certain something satisfying about writing in a notebook. It's something I used to do a lot, but lately not so much. Maybe it'll make a comeback now.

Copy Protection and Ebooks

Just finished making a more professional looking personal website. You can check it out here. Let me know if you have any trouble with it. A few folks have suggested adding home and forward/back buttons, which I think is a pretty good idea – that'll definitely come in the near future.

A few months ago my mom asked me to assemble a Christmas wish list. I thought about stuff that I been wanting for a while and settled on an Amazon Kindle. But not long before my mom actually started on her Christmas shopping, I pulled it from the list.

I realized that, with a Kindle, I'd mostly be buying content from Amazon's Kindle Store. That seems fine and dandy at first. Then it dawned on me that I'd then only be able to read content on devices that Amazon had created apps for. And the Kindle doesn't allow you to read ebooks from libraries, which is growing in popularity along with the rise of ebook readers.

So I tried to find another eReader. I thought a little more about Barnes and Noble's Nook, which is a device with a lot of potential. Unlike the Kindle, it allows you to read books in EPUB format – that means that library books are OK. Unfortunately, in my experience the touch screen interface is incredibly sluggish. Imagine trying to use an iPhone that has a half-second delay whenever you try to push a button. It doesn't seem like a big deal on paper, but in execution, it's very frustrating.

Then I looked at Borders' solution, the Kobo. (It isn't strictly Borders' device, but they're really pushing it as if it was their own.) The Kobo seemed like a nice, minimalist reader. There's no keyboard or touchscreen like the Kindle and Nook respectively. It allows you to read books in EPUB format – score one for library books. And it allows you to read books that you purchase from a whole bunch of online bookstores. Awesome. It seemed like the device for me.

I started browsing some of those online bookstores. Then it dawned on me that very few of them sold content without copy-protection.

I understand the supposed intent regarding copy-protection. That it's supposed to prevent people from pirating content. But as I learned from trying to play video that I'd purchased from the iTunes Store on my PS3, it has other downsides. Copy protection tends to lock users into only using devices that have been approved by content producers.

Buying content that only works on arbitrary devices doesn't make a lot of sense to me as a consumer. I'd be loathe to purchase a DVD from Sony that only played on Sony brand DVD players. On the same token, I'm hesitant to buy digital copies of TV shows or movies from online stores like Amazon or the iTunes Store, which have copy protection that prohibits them from playing on unapproved devices.

(And let me be clear that I'm not talking about technological limitations. I'm perfectly aware that sometimes it's just not technologically possible for some content to be played on some devices. To make a comparison: I'm not railing against the inability to play a Wii game on my PS3; I'm railing against the inability to play stuff that I bought on Amazon on my iPod touch.)

Further: I'm super hesitant to buy books or video that I can't let my friends borrow. I'm not talking about copying or file-sharing here – I'm talking about lending. I like being able to lend a DVD to a friend for a month or two. I like to read a book and pass it on to a friend to see what they think. I realize that some content providers are getting hip to this and trying to think up solutions. The ability to share books that Barnes and Noble pioneered on the Nook comes to mind. However, at this point, said solutions are half-baked at best. With the Nook, for instance, you're free to share an ebook you've purchased – for a period of two weeks. And once you share it once, you can't ever share it again, not even to another person.

So where's all this ranting going? To make a long story just a little bit longer: I decided that now wasn't the time to get an ebook reader. In fact, I don't think I can justify purchasing – or having someone purchase me – one of those devices until copy protection restrictions are completely eliminated from ebooks.

Maybe that won't happen anytime soon. But paper books have been around for a long time; they should tide me over until then.

Film Time

The mid-90s was a weird time for technology. I mean, I guess every time is sort of a weird time for technology – constant change is just sort of part of the game, hence the weirdness – but what I'm thinking about right now is technology in my elementary school.

From the time I was in kindergarten to fourth grade, all of the computers in our computer lab were DOS based. I don't know what exactly type of computers they were, but I remember that they looked a lot like the original Macintosh. It wasn't until I was in third grade that we got computers that were capable of doing more "modern" things like running Windows 95 and connecting to the internet. Even then, the majority of the computers at the school were those old DOS-based ones until I was in fifth grade or so.

One piece of technology that was well on its way out by the time I'd started kindergarten, though, was the film projector. And yet from kindergarten to third grade, we seemed to have a weekly tradition of gathering all the students in a particular grade into a single classroom, rolling out a film projector, and watching a couple of the reels that our teachers had rented from Heartland, which (among other things) functioned as Netflix for educators in the state of Iowa. (Except they dealt with film reels instead of DVDs, of course.)

Most of the films they played for us really showed their age. Seventies music and outdated outfits were the norm. I remember watching one film that one of our older teachers prefaced with a little announcement. "I'm actually in this one at the very beginning," she said. "I was in college back then." Sure enough, there she was during a montage of people at the beginning of the film. Except she was much, much younger.

We had TVs with VHS players. We'd even watch stuff on TV from time to time. And yet, for the longest time, it was some sort of weekly ceremony for us to cram into a single classroom, sit on the floor, and watch some educational short film on one of the projectors.

The screenings came to a complete halt when we reached fourth grade. At the time, I figured it was some sort of rite of passage – "You're older now, so it's time to say goodbye to film time," – but in hindsight, it was probably because either the district or Heartland had upgraded their equipment.

I kind of wonder if the kids back at Crestview have a similar tradition these days. If they still all get together once a week to watch a few educational shorts. I don't doubt that film projectors are no longer part of the equation. In fact, they probably watch them now over some sort of streaming service online. My teachers who had to wait weeks at a time to get a reel of film can probably now click a button and get almost any film in a massive library almost instantly.

The pragmatist in me is amazed by this development. But the nostalgic, tactile part of me is a little bummed.

Mr. Rolling Cart

I have a folding rolling cart. I got it for the purpose of rolling groceries from the store to my apartment – I've had more than a few bad experiences in grocery stores where I've forgotten that I don't have a car to help me lug stuff back – but I never actually used it. All it's ever really done for me is take up space in my closet. It does a fine job of that, but I think it would do an even better job of lugging groceries.

So I put it on Craigslist. I figured there was at least one person in this city who needed a rolling cart. And so I threw together a post late one night last week. It was a pretty typical post. And then I realized I wrote this:

Let me know if you have any questions. Accepting cash only. You'll have to meet me someplace nearby my apartment to pick it up. Price will be reduced by 25% if you make an offer in proper limerick form.

A couple of days went by. I more or less forgot about the posting, save for the moments where I'd look at my rolling cart with pity. "You poor rolling cart," I would say. "You are failing to self-actualize. And it's all my fault."

And then I got this email:

too much gym and my back is a wreck now.

lift a gallon of milk and the pain, ow.

i'll begrudgingly buy

your cart or i'll lie

supine and without any chow.

The moral of the story is that the internet is a wonderful place.

What On Earth?: Animated Film

When I was in sixth grade, I saw this animated short late night on PBS. It was about an alien race who thought that cars were the dominant life form on earth. I knew absolutely nothing about it beyond that – who made it, when it was made, where it was made – but in spite of that (or perhaps because of that) I was intrigued. I never made an attempt to track it down, mostly because I wasn't sure how I'd go about doing that, but it never left my mind. It'd pop into my mind every few years after that.

Somehow I found it today. It's called What on Earth! and it's just as awesome as I remember it being.

My Chair

My apartment came with a bunch of furniture. There was the standard appliances, of course: fridge, oven, microwave. (Though I hear that last one is a rarity among apartments.) There was some other stuff, too: a little table with a few chairs.

The weirdest thing, though, is the desk/workstation in the closet. It makes for a neat place to put away all of my papers and electronic stuff, but the placement is a little strange. Few people associate "closet" with "desk." Regardless, the desk is pretty nice.

The office chair it came with, on the other hand? Horrid. Terrible. It has this nasty habit of lowering itself every now and then and making a loud CRACK sound. Which completely knocks me out of whatever sense of flow I might've had.

It's like holding an office job where the guy in the cubicle next to you has a habit of tossing firecrackers into the air. It never fails to frustrate or surprise me.

Work for the Turk

One of the most wonderful things about being a film major is that you learn a lot about collaboration. A lot of wonderful stuff can arise from it. As much as a lot of people like to worship the myth of a solitary genius, the fact of the matter is that it's impossible to make a film entirely on one's own.

And one of the most awful things about being a film major is that you learn a lot about collaboration. Since it's college, you run into a lot of people who are unable or unwilling to pull their share of work. Working with folks like these is sort of like trying to build a machine out of faulty parts.

Since my major – and particularly, my classes for this semester – are so heavily driven by collaboration, holding a part time job is a little difficult. The schedule may or may not interfere with outside classwork, of which there's quite a lot of. So it puts me in kind of a pickle. My options are to make money and run into a bunch of scheduling conflicts with school or to remain workless and cut a few corners on stuff like going out.

So as to avoid this I've been doing some stuff on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It's basically the internet equivalent of minimum wage/assembly line work. Folks give you assignments, which can entail anything from taking a survey or a psychological test to writing 150 words about your toaster, and then they pay you. Typical pay for an assignment is about $1 - $2. It's not a lot, but if you can do a lot of work in a short amount of time, it pays for a few meals.

It's not ideal work – and if you aren't smart about it, you won't get a lot of money out of it – but it puts a little bit of money in my bank account every now and then. It's doing the trick rather nicely thus far.

Review of The Illusionist

When it comes to movie watching I live in a weird paradox. I'm no good at watching films on my own at my own place, but I'm not particularly good at watching movies in a theater with others. The problem with the prior is that I get distracted easily – after all, it's my place – so the movie ends up getting only a fraction of my attention. The problem with the latter is that I have a tendency to want to communicate with the folks I'm with, may it be verbally or non-verbally. That's pretty distracting, too. (I don't have this communication problem when watching movies with friends at my own place; it's a lot easier to exchange glances or little comments in the privacy of one's home.) So if I watch a movie with friends at my own place – great. They tend to keep me focused on the movie – after all, it's not exactly acceptable to get up and start cleaning the apartment while your friends are sitting on your couch watching a movie with you.

I've only ever seen a movie at a theater by myself twice. The first film I ever saw on my own was Dogtooth, which was one of those movies that left a dark emotional cloud hanging over me for at least a couple of hours after I'd left the theater. 

I watched the second film I'd ever seen on my own just yesterday – The Illusionist, based on an unfilmed script by comedy legend Jacques Tati. Better yet: it was directed by Sylvain Chomet, the director and driving creative force behind The Triplets of Belleville, one of my all-time favorite movies. Basically, put Chomet and Tati on the same ticket and you have a cinephile's wet dream.

I try my best to go into movies/games/media in general with little to no forewarning of what I'm going to expect. I consciously avoid trailers, advertisements and reviews (except for a glance at a rating on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic) to ensure that I'll be getting a "fresh" experience. Maybe that was a mistake this time.

I expected The Illusionist to be the same sort of film as Belleville. And it does have a lot in common with it, because – surprise! – it's directed by the same dude. The distinct animation style that blends ink and paper animation with CGI is there. The over-exaggerated, sometimes grotesque characters are there. There's no real dialogue here, either. But that doesn't mean that it's Triplets of Belleville Part 2.

The Illusionist lacks the insanity of Belleville. Where Belleville exists in a hyper-bizarre cartoon world of its own, The Illusionist exists in a universe a little closer to our own. That's not to say that everything that happens in this film could happen in real life; I'm just trying to let you know that the shenanigans in The Illusionist aren't anywhere near as insane as those in Belleville.

At first that disappointed me. Indeed, for the first two-thirds of the film, where an aging magician meets a young girl and forms a friendship with her, I felt like The Illusionist was floundering. I wasn't sure where exactly it was going – hell, I wasn't sure if even the director knew where it was going. All the while, I wondered when – or if – the insanity that I loved so much about Belleville would appear. It didn't. But that's okay.

Because then came the third act.

That's when I realized that attempting to compare Belleville to The Illusionist is like comparing apples to oranges. The Illusionist is not a silly cartoon like Belleville; it's a sad film about growing old and watching the world around you change. In fact, it's pretty damn sad. I was on the verge of tears for at least the last fifteen minutes of the film. (On a semi-related note: animated films sure seem to be good at making me almost cry. I'm looking at you, Toy Story 3.)

So if you have any intention of seeing The Illusionist  – and if you haven't considered it, well, maybe you should – remember: don't expect The Triplets of Belleville. And complaining about that – something I was very close to doing – is kind of like complaining that "Strawberry Fields Forever" sounds nothing like "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." Yeah, they're two works made by the same artist. But artists grow and change over time. They explore new styles. And there's nothing wrong with that if they still make damn good work.

Back Again

Back in Chicago again. I'm here a week before class starts, so I've got plenty of time to get stuff together before going back to school.

There's something for me about living at home – the place I grew up in – that makes me very lazy. When I'm back there I kind of feel like I should be waking up to go to high school the next morning. Being back on my own in Chicago makes me feel a little more independent; like it's easier to get up and actually do a whole bunch of stuff. (That's not to say that I've been crossing every little thing off of my to-do list over the past couple days, but I'm doing a hell of a lot better than I was at home.)

Walking everywhere is something I missed. Really. I don't mean that in a sarcastic sort of way. Walking in the cold isn't fun, but there's something very satisfying about going down a sidewalk to get to where you need to go rather than driving there. I don't think it's faster than walking, but it certainly feels a lot like that.

These posts lately have been a little filler-ish. I think that's because I've been writing them without making an outline first.

Winter Break, Checking In

Figured that I ought to check in at some point.

This may or may not be my last day in Iowa for a little while. Originally I was set to leave on Monday, but my dad's been talking for at least a week about a snowstorm that's supposed to hit come then. So we're probably going to be leaving tomorrow instead. That's perfectly fine by me. I've been in kind of a weird situation over the last few days; I don't have a car when my family's away for the day, so I've been under psuedo house arrest. The ability to actually do things on my own would be nice.

As you might've noticed, lately I've been opting out of posting longish critical analyses of films and video games. That's because I'm so entrenched in that stuff when I'm at school that to go on about it here gets a little exhausting. Hence posts that've been a little more personal in nature.

That being said – some notes about media I've been watching/playing lately:

• Just watched The Social Network with my sister and her boyfriend. Good stuff. I'm a sucker for dialogue driven films. I'm more than aware that certain liberties were taken with the story, which is okay by me, as long as audiences are aware that they're not seeing events as they actually occurred. Props to Justin Timberlake; his performance was pretty phenomenal.
• I've been playing around with the Mac App Store and been pretty pleased with it all. Some features are still missing, but I don't doubt that they'll be filled in over time. Most of my purchases have been games, among them And Yet It Moves, which is a very clever platformer. It doesn't take a lot of time to finish it, but it's still a lot of fun. I've also finally started on Braid, one of the first "indie" games that got a lot of attention from the mainstream gaming press. That attention was well deserved. Very impressive game mechanics, some interesting themes being explored in the story, beautiful art, beautiful soundtrack. The game's made me have more than a few BioShock moments – moments where I realize that video games are capable of doing far more in terms of emotional and aesthetic experience than we give them credit for.
• A friend raved to me about Adventure Time, which has been my media equivalent of candy for the past few days. It's temporarily nourishing, but by no means something one ought to have a lot of in one sitting. I remember seeing the short that spawned the series a year or two ago and thinking that it was a really well done parody of kids TV. Now I'm starting to realize that it's not a parody – it's the real deal. I'm not sure whether that's unreassuring, hilarious, or both. (I feel like this one deserves some expansion in a future post; perhaps when I finish the series.)
• Finally finished Atlas Shrugged. All I'll say is that I only just now realized how apropos it was that I started reading it while waiting for an Amtrak train that was three hours late.

And now it's time to start packing.

That One Homeless Guy With The Awesome Voice

My apologies if you're having trouble visiting this blog. I've been doing some heavy re-development with my personal domain name; things should be more stable in a week or so. I'm just waiting on my laptop to get back from AppleCare.

In the midst of some scanning. Lots and lots of scanning. Lots and lots of old family photos. It's a weird reminder of a different era. I realize that it was only a little over ten years ago when most of these photos were taken, but I think it's safe to safe that it was a different era. The photos were all taken on film. The internet was growing but nowhere near as big as it is now. 9/11 had yet to happen.

Some of them are kind of cool in a weird and nostalgic sort of way. I might try to upload them.

I posted a link in the sidebar about this homeless guy who's got a really amazing radio voice. You might have already seen it in the blogs that you read - hell, you might have seen it on TV; my parents told me that the guy was on one of the morning shows today. (I'm beginning to feel more and more as if morning shows are nothing more than regurgitations of stuff that's gained popular on the internet. Then again, that's kind of an unfair statement on my part, for reasons that I could go into that would make this parenthetical entirely too long.)

Anyway, it's a really amazing story, the way things've played out. Recent news reports have been saying that the guy's got job offers coming from all over the country. Quicken has agreed to pay for his mortgage, which is both nice and a great way to capitalize on the attention that this guy's getting.

I'm a sucker for stories like these, but the cynical part of me always jumps a little bit when coming across something like this. My first thought was something like, "Oh, how awesome. This guy's trying to get it together and it looks like it's working." My second thought was, "Wait. What if this guy's not homeless? What if he's just an out of work DJ looking for attention?"

It's incredibly cynical, I know. But in an era in which really hilarious and awesome stories like Balloon Boy turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated solely for the sake of attention, I feel like it's kind of a natural attitude to take on.

That being said: the Balloon Boy thing was revealed to be a hoax less than four days after it happened. This thing has been going on for a week or so, from what I understand. Kind of a long time for a guy to pretend to be homeless and not get caught.

Hooray for warm and fuzzy stories. Hooray for awesome voices. And hooray for healthy degrees of skepticism, I guess.

Some Fragmented Thoughts (Without Bullet Points This Time)

Part of a conversation I had today:

LONG LOST CASUAL ACQUAINTANCE: I feel like you were younger when I last saw you.
ME: Yeah. I was definitely a bit younger back then.

Winter break tends to have its way of ruining any productive sort of sleep schedule that I might have once had in place. Combine that with getting back from a trip that caused you to live on a four hour time difference for ten days - and combine that with the ultimate circadian rhythm fuck-up that is a redeye flight - and things really start to get messy.

Every time I type circadian rhythm I inevitably spell it wrong. As cicadean rhythm. As in a rhythm that pertains to a particular type of loud summer insects. I'm pretty sure nobody else ever tries to adjectiveify the word cicada. But I also wouldn't be surprised if I wasn't alone.

I'm in the midst of doing some menial work for my family. I'm scanning old photos and then digitally cleaning them up. Pretty unexciting work, but it becomes very easy to get into a flow-ish sort of state.

About 700 pages into Atlas Shrugged. It has its share of flaws, but it's ultimately inspired some fun internal dialogues. More than anything, the book's taught me that it's very hard to write a book that works as both a philosophy piece and an engaging story. A lot of the "good guys" are on the interchangeable side as far as character traits go.  I wouldn't call it one of the Great Books - let alone a great book - but it's certainly a page turner. The cruel writer in me gets a sadistic sort of pleasure at seeing what terrible things she can put her protagonists (and ultimately, everyone in the world she's created) through. That started to get a bit stale, though; luckily I just got to Part III of the book, which offers a nice change of pace.

Here's a video of me when I was four. I was less than tactful to trick-or-treaters. I was also a little younger back then.

Books I Read (2010)

Vacation posts kind of came to a halt for a variety of reasons. Hint: it had a little something - but not everything - to do with my note in the last post about the internet connection in our condo being really awful.

I'm a little late on this, but here's the list of books I read in 2010. I had a lot of opportunities to get reading done this year; having a job for the first half of the year that allowed me to read on the clock (and starting at a college that didn't require me to do a lot of reading) definitely helped me out there. I think this is the first year I've breached the 100 books mark, which doesn't mean a whole lot but is pretty cool to me.

Notes and technicalities as per usual: you might not consider some of these books; a lot of them are really significant short stories. That's okay. (Take the word "significant" as you will.)

Every link below goes to its corresponding page on Amazon, except for a book about Wittgenstein by P.M.S. Hacker (who may or may not have given a lot of thought to the sort of visual imagery that his name inspires) that I just couldn't find on Amazon for some reason. All links to public domain books go to their Penguin Classics editions. I'm a big fan of Penguin Classics; the translations are usually pretty readable and dynamic.

Books that I didn't completely finished are not listed. That means that there are probably five or ten books I got sorta-kinda through that don't quite deserve to be on here.

Finally: books that I found particularly engaging, entertaining, or thought provoking - but not necessarily all three - are in bold.

Here we go.

• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 edited by Dave Eggers
• Blindness by José Saramago
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
• Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
• Ignore Everybody and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Through The Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (re-read)
• The Art of War by Sun Tzu
• Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
• Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan
• The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 by Richard Brautigan
• So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Anthem by Ayn Rand
• Mr. Monk in Outer Space by Lee Goldberg
• Girl with Curious Hair by David Foster Wallace
• Self Made Man by Norah Vincent
• Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
• Antigone by Sophocles
• The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
• The Odyssey by Homer
• Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas by James L. Adams
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• King Lear by William Shakespeare
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
• Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman
• Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges
• On The Nature of the Universe by Lucretius
• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
• Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 edited by Dave Eggers
• Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Wittgenstein by PMS Hacker
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
• Beowulf on the Beach by Jack Murnighan
• The Last Days of Socrates by Plato
• The Acharnians by Aristophanes
• Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity by David Lynch
• The Clouds by Aristophanes
• Lysistrata by Aristophanes
• American Voyeur by Benoit Denizet-Lewis
• Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
• White Noise by Don DeLillo (re-read)
• No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
• All About Sam by Lois Lowry (re-read)
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
• No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
• Under the Banner of Heaven by John Krakauer
• Falling Man by Don DeLillo
• The Heights by Peter Hedges
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• David Byrne (American Originals) by John Howell
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Republic by Plato
• Candide by Voltaire
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcom Gladwell
• A Leg to Stand On by Oliver Sacks
• The Game by Neil Strauss
• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2004 edited by Dave Eggers
• The Analects by Confucius
• The Castle by Franz Kafka
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 2: Scott Pilgrim Versus the World by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 3: Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 5: Scott Pilgrim Versus the Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• Scott Pilgrim Volume 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
• Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay
• Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter by Tom Bissell
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
• The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
• The Discreet Pleasures of Rejection by Martin Page
• Socrates Cafe by Christopher Phillips
• Early Socratic Dialogues by Plato
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
• From Shakespeare to Existentialism by Walter Kaufmann
• Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street by Michael Davis
• Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Focault
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman
• Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction by Leo Babuta
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Shape of Things by Neil Labute
• The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross
• New World Monkeys by Nancy Mauro
• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
• Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach
• Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus
• iCon: Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business by Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon (re-read)
• Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary by David Sedaris
• Grace by Craig Wright
• Celebration, USA: Living in Disney's Brave New Town by Douglas Franz and Catherine Collins
• Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die edited by Ryan North, Matthew Bernardo and David Malki !