How to read what's on the site: All of this material is Copyright by Mel Reichler, Jim Egan and Tom Surprenant 2002
There are different things here.
The Man with the Ladder Stories are tales that recount the very ordinary, fantastical tales of the the Man with a Ladder. They are little chunks of wisdom put into boxes of chocolates and taffy. Be warned that one or two of them may change your life and that you will never be able to shake completely clear of them once you read them.
The Corkscrews are original epigrams, quotations; if the MWL stories are boxes of sweets, the Corkscrews are sugar coated steel morsels with a curl, a kink and a point. Suck on them or chew on them but carefully. The warning about the MWL stories goes twice as strongly for the Corkscrews.
The Moments are little jazz pieces on the Corkscrews.
Vermeers is a very funny novel of a sociologist who goes crazy and helps a liver specialist turned hospital administrator defeat greed, avarice and sanity.
Ashley in the Computer is an update 21st century take on Alice in Wonderland, what Alice would have been had it be written in our century.
50 Uncommon Prayers are the prayers of an unreligious person who occasionally feels the need to pray and makes do without a religion to pray in.
12 Christmas Stories are just that: 12 New Christmas Stories. Some of them are very good; they are stories of Christmas in America now.
The Meditations are just that: meditations on the Corkscrews. Some of them are very very smart, others smart assed. But They meditate on the wisdom of a sub set of Corkscrews. You should read at least one or two.
The Collected Stories have a few science fiction pieces that are original and for the time being, on the edge. Probably science will push them over the edge ina few years but for the time being, The Interface and The Rembrant Competition are thought provoking and entertaining.
The Collected Poems are a very mixed bag; I personally think the best of them will move you; There are fragments that appeal to our baser side and other pieces ( the Chinese Poems) the reach out acrosscontinents and time. They are worth looking at.
The three sociological pieces are more technical pieces of sociology; The sports paper is the first part of a project that I am working on to develop a theory of Sports. Jay M. Keehn worked with me on it. A second paper is on its way. The Theory of Friendship is my contribution to the study of friendship. The paper on norms I think will be seen, when sociology changes the way it must, as a forshadowing of where the main problem lay and pointing in a direction that might change things for the better.
The book Information is worth a look if you are interesting in a short, throught provoking introduction to the field of Information and a discussion of why our life has changed so much so quickly.