Readernaut

I'm a childfree transhumanist geek with strongly neophilic tendencies. And I love teh kittehs; my wife and I are owned by three of them. ^_^

My reading is driven by what you might call "thought candy" — works that give center stage to provocative ideas. Insofar as fiction, most thought candy tends to be in the form of hard science fiction, so that's what I usually read. I also have a minor weakness for certain aesthetics ("mind's-eye candy"?) that can crop up in fantasy works, but that genre tends to give short shrift to ideas, thus leaving me cold.

As for nonfiction, psychology and philosophy are my mainstays. I have little patience for "fuzzy" writings and wish-thinking, so I largely avoid biographies, sociology, religion, politics, and "current events" works. I don't read much history, either; historical works are badly distorted by the bias of the author, and furthermore, I don't particularly care about the past — today and tomorrow are all that matter to me, and rapid technological change makes the "lessons" of history much less relevant than many think.

Once upon a time, I almost became a librarian; while I eventually dropped out of grad school and went back to being a web developer, I still have quite a bit in common with many librarians: a passion for free speech, a respect for education (including autodidacticism), and a disdain for the monstrous state of "intellectual property" law. The main thing I don't share is a love for the traditional book format; I read just about everything these days on my Amazon Kindle, and I suspect electronic ink is going to kill the dead-tree book format. (It can't happen fast enough!)