My study space ...

Some shots of my study space, where most of my research, blogging, and writing takes place. My rig is a circa 2003 iMac which -- believe it or not -- runs on a dial-up connection. That's all I needed to conduct thousands of searches on LexisNexis, write dozens of papers (and export them as PDFs, thanks to the Mac OS X PDF support), and hundreds of blog entries. I have to admit, though, that dial-up is tough for uploading photos to Harvard Extended, or downloading music from iTunes. It typically takes five or ten minutes to do each of these tasks.

The colorful object right in front of the Mac are some poker chips that my son found and dropped on my lap while I was working -- Extension School students with young kids know that family distractions are an inevitable part of at-home study!


The bookshelf is overwhelmingly China-oriented, and includes textbooks, journals, and books I've read for fun (which I haven't touched for years, there's just no time). My favorite book in the lot is a used copy of Fosco Maraini's Meeting With Japan. I picked it up at the local library sale a few years ago, and am amazed at this man's tale and his beautiful writing about Japan.

Runners up would be 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (Ray Huang's fascinating look at everyday life in the Ming Court in the late Ming dynasty) or The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci , by Jonathon Spence, a biography of the famous Jesuit who lived in the Ming court. Both of these books were introduced to me by Merle Goldman, who taught Chinese history at Boston University when I was an undergraduate.