The Pile On My Desk

Sometimes you think of a post title, and then it occurs to you that 'The Colour Out Of Space' would be an equally good title. It does funny things to your mind.

But here I have in front of me a pile, indeed. And the pile is full of stuff which I am reading, have been reading, or will have read in a while. Besides the obvious fiction, which includes much Peter Beagle (an interest rekindled by a unicorn), Philip Reeve, Andrea Camilleri, China Miéville and Gail Carriger, I also have much not-so-obviously-fiction which might even be non-fiction.

It is this latter class which I will now describe.

I have the following on and around my desk right now, all partly read:

• Michael Sandel's Justice;
• Bryan Turner's The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies;
• Tu Wei-Ming's Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity;
• Simon Winchester's Atlantic;
• John Kay's Obliquity;
• Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto;
• Nassir Ghaemi's A First-Rate Madness; and
• Lee Kuan Yew's My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore's Bilingual Journey.

I have no idea what will emerge from this confluence, but the last time this kind of stuff interacted, I found myself two book chapters and a thesis to the good. I cannot wait to see strange beast will soon slouch its way through the Internet to be born.