I was (briefly) in a book club back in Cleveland. Rest assured, I'm still reading books.

There are a few right now, in particular, that I can't get enough of. One of them tells the disjointed narrative of two guys who lived several hundred years ago and whiled away the time thinking of novel ways to figure out exactly how much cow dung you could stockpile in arbitrarily shaped sheds. A couple others are written in Hebrew letters, but when you read them aloud, they sound suspiciously like German. Another one looks like it's made out of ordinary English alpha-bits until you notice the the funny upside-down hats on top of half the letters in every word, and that the other half of the letters are all “J”.

The remaining two classes have me either writing down what someone plays on a piano as a series of blobs, lines, and squiggles along a five-line grid, or else singing (without any practice, in rhythm and on pitch) whatever someone else wrote on that grid.

It's clear I've decided that — at least for the next few months — every book I read must present a domain-specific notation for me to comprehend, manipulate, and generate expressively. Good thing it's a one-man club; I'd have a hard time getting anyone else to countenance my criteria!