I'm not dead

Hey folks, I know, I haven't updated the site in more than a week, and now I'm going up to the Bay Area for a week, so I probably won't have anything more to add until late next week. Jen came home last week from Indiana, so I've been jostled out of the comfortable [UPDATE (see comments): also lonely and boring!] sitting- at- home- and- blogging lifestyle I'd been living all summer. Anyway, I'm still here and will probably put some more stuff up late next week.

Coming soon: Book reports! Here's what I've been reading since May:

• Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
• Malcolm Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
• Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
• The Epic of Gilgamesh (translated and edited by Maureen Gallery Kovacs)
• Chester Brown's The Little Man: Short Strips, 1980-1995
• Ben Marcus's The Age of Wire and String: Stories
• Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time

So that's what I'll probably write about when I get back. I also intend to start on Marc Levinson's The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger when I finish A Brief History of Time.

For now, I'll just say that all of these books have been pretty fascinating.