Member ivoryt

My library, shared with wife and daughter, fills 150 feet of shelves. Here I will only catalog particularly unusual or favorite books, as well as reviewing books recently read (sadly, most of those are ebooks because fine print is difficult. About 5-10% of our books are about cooking. I shelve fiction by author's name, and nonfiction by my own set of categories, the weirdest of which is "Woo-woo.". The lib's most distinctive feature is two complete sets of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, one softcover and one hardcover. I also have those books in audio and have listened to all 19 of them three times.

I'm a retired scientist who studied monkey behavior at first, but mostly worked in medical informatics, where I made some advances in medical data search engines and (AI) reasoning to critique clinical care. After retirement, I started to write a book on the subjectivity triad: Consciousness, Self, and Identity. I wrote about half of the chapters but gradually became discouraged about who might read it. I began blogging on Medium on related topics, with a focus on AI futures and consciousness. All this happened before GPT-2 started the explosion of AI that we have today. I moved my writing focus to Substack and called that project Sentient Artifact.

With an interest in consciousness and AI, and a background in sociobiology, I drifted into the border between science and the supernatural, as well as any cultural topics that struck me. Then I ran into Bill Gore, a college roommate, who was making beautiful abstract images by entangling multiple photographs. He liked to imagine that he might someday enter a reality based on his images. Somehow this turned into me writing a short story in which that happened to an artist, and events of the story were tied to Bill's abstracts. Connecting the images with a storyline was hard. I had the protagonist interact with nature spirits, creatures similar to the animistic Shinto religion's Kami. We made a scrolling online version. We then designed a book, calling it The Saugatuck Cosmology. Bill printed and manually bound some prototypes, and then we privately printed (but did not publish) some for friends.

Bill's next art project made me think more about alternate realities. I was inspired to write a short novel that incorporated his new oeuvre (stunning, colorful, and varied images of great imagination) as the visual appearance of another realm of being. I also used the story to take the reader through a dialectic about animism's relation to natural reality. We are on the way to publishing that book, The Flown Bird Society, and have made it an offering to LibraryThing's Early Reviewers. It's an unusual book needing unusual readers. Thus, we are indie authors at the mercy of forces beyond our understanding.

I am heartened to find LibraryThing, which is filled with readers of manifold interests and not focused, as some communities are, on genre entertainment. My comfort genre is science fiction, where my favorite writers are as different as Jack Vance, Neal Stephenson, Iain M. Banks, and William Gibson. My other faves are even more diverse in style, themes, and subject matter: John LeCarre. Rudyard Kipling, Tim Powers, and Patrick O'Brian. With LibraryThing, I have already gone down rabbit holes and discovered new authors and books to try. The life of the mind is a salt marsh, and my boat drifts, a watery trail down bayous tangled like a rhizome; and maybe no clear path will emerge.