May 18, Monday evening -- Reading Emily Brontë

The man in the background from the picture before.

We got onto the same train and I was bending to peek under the book to see the title on the cover and he spared me my efforts and held it up for me to see.

Reading Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.
His favorite book -- Don Quixote, by Cervantes, which he says perfected everything that had come before (pulp novels about chivalry) and predicted everything that was to come after. Saying Cervantes is your favorite author, he said, is sort of like saying The Beatles is your favorite band, that it's so opaque. Yet, he continued, there are so many things, so many authors that have Cervantes in them that he likes -- Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges to name two.

Wuthering Heights is something he's been meaning to read for a long time and it's even better than expected, because it has his wife's college notes in it! And, something even still better has enhanced his reading experience -- when he began (and this is the first time he's done this) he did a twitter search for Wuthering Heights, and then followed people who had mentions, with hopes that they would see his tweets about the book, follow him, and engage. For this he created a new twitter name -- @TheBrothersBell; that is, the name that the Bronte sisters would write under: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell -- and has been tweeting about the book. He's had a contentious discussion with an Australian about the narrative voice.

You can also check out his blog -- The Pocket Square. The first entry invites you to Washington DC, to the Finish Embassy (if you happen to be there) for a discussion he'll be moderating for Dwell magazine about design, diplomacy, security, and sustainability in embassies worldwide.
I feel so at one with the Bay Area, so aptly represented here on my first day back on BART post- surgery: if your not a scholar reading java, you're scholarly tweeting about the classics.