Closing tabs

Internet telegraphy!  (Courtesy of Alice.  It is an old obsession of mine...)

Matthew Kirschenbaum on Tom Clancy's use of tabletop gaming to choreograph battle scenes.

I liked Ready Player One hugely more than I expected to - I caught a glimpse of a few paragraphs over B.'s shoulder when he was reading it, the sequence in which the narrator describes the eighties cultural materials with which the book's characters are obsessed, and thought it really would not be my cup of tea, but in fact it is quite delightful.  Then a good recommendation from Becca, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always, and that sent me back to another of Becca's recommendations that I had put on my Kindle but never gotten around to, The Flight of Gemma Harding by Margot Livesey.  I love Livesey's writing, and this is an enjoyable read, but I think I just know Jane Eyre too well, and was perplexed by how closely this book followed the earlier novel's contours.

Also: Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which I found worthwhile but not as generally gripping as Maryanne Wolf's book; and a reread of the curious and fascinating Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell, which I blogged about here when I first read it.  Highly recommended!

Flying back to New York later this afternoon.  One more week before the semester starts.