Slipping into old habits again, it seems, with regard to that whole “buying books faster than I can read them” thing. There are worse vices to have, I suppose.

From the bottom, then:

• Containment by Angerer et al. (eds.) is the book which contains (har har har) my academic swansong essay, as discussed here. It’s a fully open access book, remember, so you can just download the whole dang thing for free if you like.

(For extra “feeling like an academic” points, download it, promise yourself you’ll read it, and then periodically open the folder in which you put this and all the other books you promised yourself you’d read, before sighing and wondering how it all came to this.)

• The Escher Man by Napper because it looks like a sort of neo-cyberpunk sort of thing, and they’re rare enough these days (or so it seems to me) that I’d like to encourage them.
• Artifact Space by Miles Cameron because Jay Springett has been raving about it to me, so I figured it was worth seeing what I think of it.
• The Book Censor’s Library by Al-Essa because what bibliophile can resist a book about a dystopia in which books are under threat? Comparisons to Kafka, Orwell and Lewis Carroll don’t go amiss, either.

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Struggling to get myself back in gear after last week’s London mission. Yesterday was quite deliberately written off for recovery, but at the same time turned out to be quite busy, not to mention expensive: dentist, optician, barbershop. New books’n’screens glasses are bringing a much missed clarity to time at the desk, but woe betide me if I should stand up without swapping back to the daily drivers.

This blog post is blatant procrastination, as I should be making a list of all the countless little things that I need to get on top of this week, or (better still) actually getting on with some of them… but the list is gonna have to come first, lest the unlisted things haunt whatever thing I try to start doing.

First of October, for goodness’s sake—how are we into the last quarter of the year already? How can I have been so busy, but my pockets still be so empty? Why is it that every time one building or renovation project within audible range of my apartment has finished, another one starts immediately after it? How many questions can I string together whose ultimate and implicit answer is always “entropy, Paul, entropy”?

Selah. On we go.