Selection from the stacks

I have a love of books that borders obsession, no doubt fostered by my grandparents tendency to collect them from garage sales and other second hand sources. Mom would read titles such as Conan The Barbarian and Lord of the Rings to my brother and I, and my personal interest in reading blossomed in high school.

Since then I've taken an interest in everything from science fiction and fantasy to metaphysics and history. Academic life also provides its own corpus of reading, often augmenting or expanding on personal interests. My backlog of books to be read always seems to grow faster than I can read them. At least they make me look smart, sitting in stacks or piled on the shelf. 

In our current situation regarding information, that of total and unfettered access, the role of the book in not only transmitting information but maintaining and safeguarding it is often neglected. In the context of the internet and computing, information is readily available and easy to organize, analyze and present to a mass audience. 

Blogs such as this one, and ones that actually matter, serve as tools of discourse, information dissemination and as agents of real world action and change. Anyone with access to the internet has access to, generally speaking, everything recorded through out human history. At no other time has humanity been so keenly aware of itself and our myriad of global, national, regional and local identities. They dynamic character of information and communication in the digital era provides us with many new tools, many of which are hardly fully realized or even fully understood. 

The printed word, on the other hand, is a source of stability and permanence when compared with the fluctuating, dynamic internet. Where as web pages, blogs and text on the web comes, goes, gets edited or rewritten by someone else, the printed word says what it says for as long as the medium lasts. The tactile satisfaction of reading physical media is backed by the security of knowing that the text will always remain the same, easy to reference and revisit. 

So in the interests of sharing knowledge and a good read, not to mention generating content, I'm going to be posting information about what I'm reading, context and history of the text and author and any related information of interest. Stay tuned!