Alone with the Text

While I have been spending a lot of time being a pappa to an energetic 14 month old boy over the last 3 months it is amazing how much reading I have managed to get done. Further to this is that the reading I have done has been my only communicative activity that moves outside my immediate surroundings. It happens that quite often i do not speak to another person other than my partner and children for two or three days at a time. The result of this equation; lots of reading and social isolation, has been a feeling that I am playing at being a humanist scholar in the old sense of the title. I am immersed in texts at the moment. To give you some idea here is my reading of current and recently completed books.

Yochai Benkler, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom"
Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, "Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media"
Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Eds), “New Media Poetics Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories”
Lars Qvortrup (Ed), “Virtual Interaction in Virtual Inhabited Worlds”
Marie-Laure Ryan, "Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media"
Marie-Laure Ryan "The Avatars of Story"

Of course if I was sitting in my cell alone with my piles of manuscripts I might even get more reading done...