The subtitle of A. J. Jacobs’ book is One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. It is as tongue-in-cheek as it sounds, but at its core is a true accomplishment: the author read through the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica in one year.

Yesterday it was hot, hot and muggy, and the kids had a friend over. After a dozen hours they were getting restless and bored, so at their suggestion I took them to the nearby mall to window shop. I had no desire to shop, window or otherwise, and so I took along my Kindle to read, and my phone, so I could stay in touch with them. The rest of Tucson had the same idea, apparently; the mall was as crowded as Christmas, swarming with people, music playing, lights blazing. I found a chair to sit in, to tune out the chaos and read, just like I used to do years ago at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

A couple of weeks ago, while having lunch at Pei Wei, I thought I saw a cyborg at the next table. A well-dressed young man, perhaps a junior executive, was leafing through some notes next to his nearly empty plate. Fixed to the right side of his head, covering his ear, was a large circular piece of electronics about a centimeter thick. Inset around the outer edge was a ring of pulsing blue light. He looked…exactly like an extra in some 1980s-era movie about The Future.

I recently finished the last of a nine-volume fantasy series by Robin Hobb, a trilogy of trilogies all set in the same medieval-like fantasy world, the Realm of the Elderlings. This is a tremendously popular milieu for fantasy writers and readers ever since Tolkien, so much so that there is an embarrassment of riches out there on the bookshelves. Also, let’s be honest, an embarrassment of junk that recycles the same two-dimensional tropes. Understanding the difficulty in finding truly valuable fantasy fiction, then, let me assure you that if you’re going to invest in a nine-volume series, this one is worth it.

My wife and I have the house to ourselves for several days over this 4th of July weekend, as my sister invited our kids to visit her in California. This is the first vacation for them away from us, and although they were a little nervous, I think the time is right. I would have liked all four of us to go, but my wife is too sick to travel that far, and I cannot take time off work this month. So the kids get a chance to spend some quality time with their aunt, and we get a sneak preview of the empty nest.

“One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” —May Sarton, poet and novelist (1912–1995)

Recently my youngest daughter and I finished the video game Myst IV: Revelation. One more Myst title remains (End of Ages), and we will have finished the entire Myst cycle. We just began this last title, but have stalled somewhat, and I wonder if we will ever finish our five-volume journey. We both enjoy playing games and especially enjoyed the first three in the Myst series. The fault, I’m afraid, lies with the games themselves, and I worry already that the final one has “jumped the shark”.

I’ve had my Kindle for almost four months and have read hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages on it, from blogs and newspapers to magazines and books both short and long, both classic and fresh. And now I must rant to the world about the surprisingly low quality of digital print. Not the font—the Kindle’s display is so much like paper, visually, and the font so smooth and clean, that I relate to it like paper print, and judge it like paper print. Because I do, I’m much more aware of the fairly severe and systematic typos that seem to slip past whatever digital proofreading process is in use, if any. Here are the worst problems, and some possible solutions:

It takes me longer than it should to compose my “out of office” email messages at work. The text of the message itself is quite short; what’s hard is actually pressing the Send button. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that I am allowed and even encouraged to use vacation days. Emotionally, it feels like I’m playing hooky. A holiday, where everyone is out of the office, is so much different than a day where I am home and everyone else is laboring away under a fluorescent glare.

Right. Up. To. HERE. A phrase that goes with a brisk horizontal salute where the speaker’s four fingers indicate the precise level up to which it has been had by them. Bulging eyes and a slight quivering of the hand are optional.

(Note: I worked on this poem a long time, trying to decide between free verse and a much stronger structure. I like the balance of what I ended up with, and what it forced me to omit.)

Rebuilt, by Michael Chorost, is the story of the author’s own experience with his bionic ear. The cover image is an x-ray of his head, the cochlear implant showing up bright and geometric against the misty, swirling bone of his skull. For someone who watched The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman with great attention and envy as a kid, this story was irresistible. What made the book even more entertaining is that Chorost is only three years older than me and was watching the same shows at about the same age, with the same fascination. It’s like finding out that an old elementary school friend had become bionic, both of us knowing its significance. He knows what it is truly like to be Steve Austin, at least at this point in history.

One thing the Kindle has helped me remember is how much I love to simply sit and read. When I first bought the Kindle, part of my justification was that it would be more portable than the couple of dozen tomes that would otherwise litter the house and the car. The irony is that now I have the Kindle and another couple of dozen physical books lying around.

The eighth and final list.

“That’s what parents are for!” This has become the one-size-fits-all answer to any complaint about further erosion of public standards of decency. The general tone behind it is, “We didn’t have kids (or don’t care about them), so let us party like we want and you stay home and protect them. If you didn’t want to do that then you shouldn’t have had kids.” I’m getting tired of it and the premise that somehow they are only my kids. They’re yours too. They are members of the next generation and they will be in power when your power is waning. Do you care yet?