The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – by Haruki Murakami (translated from Japanese by Jay Rubin, 1997)

Three books in one, a deeply “spiritual” or synchronistic and metaphorical story about a man's struggle within himself to find his lost wife. I took my time reading this book as it was a savory feast that saddened me to finish. Murakami is brilliant, and clearly “sees” what few people can “behind the scenes” of reality. Every character was “real” and well fleshed out. A very enjoyable read.

The Pigeon – by: Patrick Suskind (translated from French by John E. Woods, 1988)

This book was another gift from a philosophically-minded friend of mine. It was a very short day-in-the-life sort of story with Kafkaesque undertones. An enjoyable light read.

The Little Prince --- by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943, 2010)

This is a "children's book" for adults. It was ordered for me as a gift from a thoughtful friend. Most adults would do well to let a book like this remind them of the important lessons only their inner child can teach.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge --- by: Matt Ridley (2015)

This is one of the most interesting books I've read in a while. Ridley has derived many of the same insights and conclusions I have regarding the importance and power of the evolutionary process to not only shape our world, but our very thoughts and ideas, even art. Well-researched and well-written; a critical read for anyone interested in where human thought is going (i.e. what our general understanding will be about our world and our experiences in the near future). Ridley calls evolution one of the «most corrosive concepts in all philosophy», which is interesting, and very true. It corrodes the ignorance of relgion and superstitions like acid. I really like this book.

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality --- by: Edward Frenkel (2013)

This is the last of three books that I'd asked my attorney, and friend, Joe, to order for me from amazon recently because I've been getting excessively bored with the T.V. in my cell lately and wanted something intellectually stimulating to read. I consider reading books like this --- that challenge me mentally --- as good entertainment. And while I was indeed entertained, as this book provides a look at what you might call the "intimate side of mathematics", I was also frustrated throughout most of it, and on occassion even outrightly insulted for my lack of ability to grasp what Frenkel was talking about as he discusses his advanced research and theories in the relationship between various "continents of science" (as Frenkel calls them) such as theoretical math and quantum physics. At one point he sums up the basic principles of differential equations (i.e. Calculus) in just a few paragraphs, as if this should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it.

But, I was entertained nonetheless by his roundabout expression of math as something that not only exists in its own right as a kind of non-material reality of pure relationships, but that it is in itself infinitely more complex and "alive" than what we commonly experience here in the material and even intellectual worlds we call reality. I suspect Frenkel is alluding to none other than my own realizations that consciousness itself is somehow the product of infinite probability, which I have attempted to write about elsewhere in this blog.