Oh wow. I just received a copy of the New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, and wow. I mean, I had seen the table of contents and thought, basically, wow, but I think it’s just seeing it now and realising that it actually includes such a wonderful selection of what I think is important. Not just The Cyborg Manifesto and Ted Nelson on hypertext, but a selection of Oulipo poetry, seminal articles on GUI from the 70s and 80s, an excerpt from Understanding Comics, Moulthrop, Joyce, Aarseth, Bolter, Berners-Lee, Turkle, Laurel, and something called “Cybernated Art” by Nam June Paik written in 1966 (!) and other alluring things I’ve not even heard of and a CD-ROM with games, art, videos of demos of interfaces and computers through the last decades and the essays are annotated and interlinked and and and and…

I’d been thinking that at US$45 it was just too expensive to consider, but my first glance at this suggests it’s the only book my students will need to buy next semester. Wow.