This Week's Non-Related Reading: Elise Gravel's The Worm

Worms don’t have eyes, the eyed worm in Elise Gravel’s The Worm tells us.  Worms also don’t wear berets, drive garbage trucks, or are so gosh darned cute, but that is besides the point… This is a fabulous book that strikes a nice balance between entertainment and education—always good in a book for this age group.  Our narrator the worm wears everything from a beret to a pair of spectacles, and seen in all sorts of decidedly un-worm-like conditions (when was the last time you saw a worm driving a garbage truck?).  And the illustrations and lettering are absolutely gorgeous.  At the same time, it gives kids the chance to learn some new words like ‘invertebrate,’ or ‘hermaphrodite’**—all helpfully drawn in larger, bold, and otherwise eye-catching letters.  

It’s part of a larger series called Disgusting Creatures, though the narrator does try to tell the reader that worms are not disgusting!  Unless you plan on eating them, in which case, yes, they are disgusting and please do not eat me.  

‘Disgusting creatures’ are a good choice for edutainment—what child hasn’t let out a long, drawn out ewwwwwwwwwww when presented with something creepy, crawly, slimy, or sticky, only to be drawn in closer for a good poke?  This is the textual equivalent of a good poke, and just as satisfying. Also, I can imagine some kid, armed with both a love of grossing people out and a charming puerility digging out a worm and presenting it on some unwilling lap, armed with the knowledge that not only are worms slimy, but that some can be up to 115 feet long.  And isn’t that disgusting?  

Best out of context line: What? Delicious? No, no, no! I'm disgusting! I'm disgusting! 


Also, though I'm not exactly the target audience for the book, I'm glad I received it, because it led me to other work by the author/illustrator, Elise Gravel. And it's awesome!  Her blog is here.

I received this book as of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program. 

**Also, props to her for saying that some worms have both male and female reproductive organs. Not something sillily euphemistic, like they have both girl and boy parts.

The Fortnightly Review

The fortnightly review: 

• Cold acquired, cold not yet divested.  
• PowerPoint presentation created.  
• 30 pin to VGA connector acquired, after Apple Store mishap. 
• Conference paper presented.  
• Conference PowerPoint created (taking too much time) and presented on iPad with no problems. (taking up 1:15 more than it should have).
• Reenrollment application completed.  Fingers crossed.  
• Blue Bottle Coffee drunk.
• Books acquired and read: 
• Strangers on a Train: terrifying and engrossing, made me miss my tube stop. Twice. Gave me indigestion.
• Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore: lovely. Reminded me not a little bit of Microserfs, another favorite. 
• The Empress of the World: good book for teens, less good for adults. A solid 'meh.'
• Books acquired and not read: 
• An Instance of the Fingerpost
• The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
• Put out more Flags
• Books from conference book displays salivated over / put into my “I should have read this yesterday list:
•  far too many
• Dissertation research read: 
• pamphlets upon pamphlets, crappily written letters upon crappily written letters, articles upon articles.  
•  Dissertation chapter: 
• 14,000+ words. Still not done. My footnote word count make it a suitable length for a conference paper.  It might be good performance art: Stand in a hotel lobby in an ill fitting suit, reading in a monotone “ibid., p. 34.  Ibid., p. 347…, the work on this subject is voluminous, but for some examples, see…” 

This Week's non-related reading: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon is at a bit of a loss. His last job, web deign at NewBagel went the way of the cronut during the recession, leaving Clay with no job, an art-school thesis on Swiss typography, and an old company-issued MacBook. So when he walks by a help wanted sign and the shadowy proprietor of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore asks him what he is seeking in his shelves, he can only answer with the truth: a job. And as a clerk there, his life just gets stranger and stranger. First, he works the graveyard shift in a bookstore, but it gets weirder than that. He learns that while there are customers who will wander in with the hopes of buying a book—but there are no teenage wizards, vampire police, or biographies of Albert Einstein here—there is also a strange group of men and women who come in to borrow one of the books in the back—books written in some sort of esoteric code. And Clay must keep a meticulous of what they borrow—not just titles, but appearance, state of mind, and what the buttons on their clothes are made of. 

Things really take a turn for the weird, though, when a hyper targeted Google Ad search (“likes books, night owl, carries cash, not allergic to dust, enjoys Wes Anderson movies, recent GPS ping within 5 blocks”) brings in Kat Potente, a lover of codes with the power to harness Google’s tech to figure out just what on earth is going on in the back stacks of Mr. Penumbra’s bookstore. Unraveling that brings in a odd cast of characters participating in a modern day quest, with modern day heroes and villains (the Big Bad Wolf of the story, for example, collects the IP addresses of people who download pirated books and turns them over to be sued, and charges exorbitant licensing fees). Our narrator and his friends want to use the powers of the new to unlock the secrets of the old, and pit the mass resources of Google to solve the problem that black robed scholars have been trying to figure out with pencil and paper for 500 years. And the result is… not what anyone expected. 

There has been a lot of ink (virtual and otherwise) spilled over the fate of the book in our technological world, and I think one of the things I appreciated most about this book is the approach this book takes about the relation between books and technology. The love and admiration for both is palpable. The members of the Unbroken Spine, after all, revere and spend their lives trying to decode the Codex vitae of Aldus Manutius. If anyone wanted to make a then current technology obsolete, it was this dude. He dusted off countless manuscripts of the likes of Aristotle and Pliny, set the type, and churned out an mind-blowingly large number of copies (for the time). Who needs manuscripts? Buy my books! And even though knowledge was no longer carefully maintained in the minds of those scribes who meticulously copied it, it did not mean the end of the written word, just the beginning of the printed word. And now we have the digital word, coexisting more or less peacefully (depending on the latest polemic) with the printed one, just like shelves in Manutius’ day were stuffed with both printed texts and manuscripts. And even the ancient Mr. Penumbra has a Kindle. And a Nook. And a Kobo. And he managed to get his hands on a cool Google prototype e-reader. 

The epilogue was a bit of a letdown though, and it is an encapsulation of the one great problem I had with the novel. Everything works out, and it works out too easily. Need to make an exact facsimile of an old ledger? Well it is a good thing you happen to have a friend who can do that for you.  Scan and OCR that (hand-written) sucker?  Google an a couple of nameless and faceless people (mostly Estonians) to the rescue.  Need to clandestinely scan an old book in a library? A portable scanner will appear to you in a pizza box in DUMBO. And so on. But, that really does not detract (for me, at least) from the charm of the story, and if it can be at times hokey, well, sometimes it is nice to imagine a world where everything works out. And if the big conclusion that the main characters come to is a mushy mess that gives you the feel-good-fuzzies… well, who doesn’t like feel-good-fuzzies from time to time? 

But, it’s great. It has everything a book could need, and them some: shadowy 24 hour bookstores next to seedy 24 hour strip clubs. Lunches at Google HQ, and a midnight quest into the dragon’s lair. Museums of knitting that accept yarn donations in lieu of admissions fees, and a company that made millions by rendering breasts for computer games. Dodgy internet message boards, and dodgier libraries with books chained to the tables. So go, read it. But read it now. I can only imagine that a few years down the road, we’ll look back at how obsolete the technology described is. Oh, back in 2012, you had to carry a laptop across the room if you wanted to video chat into a party? How quaint. 

--

Best line out of context line(s): 

“I did not know people your age still read books,” Penumbra says. He raises an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that they read everything on their mobile phones.”

“Not everyone. There are plenty of people who, you know—people who still like the smell of books.”

“The smell!” Penumbra repeats. “You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell.”

“Anyway, he swiped some silver forks and spoons … and the Gerritzoon punches, Some say it was revenge, but I think it was desperation. Latin fluency doesn’t get you very far in New York City.” 

You know, I’m really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.

--

This has been, so far, my favorite book of 2014. 

Totemism - Claude Levi Strauss

How I amuse myself while reading:  adding my own commentaries to tables and charts.

Overheard of the day

“I’ve done well in my career,” says the dude trying to pick up a chick in our hostel.  

Dude, you’re staying in a hostel.  You’re not fooling anyone with your tales of great wealth, amassed because you “work harder than anyone [you] know” and never take vacations.  It is 11pm on a Thursday.  You’re hanging out in the common room of a dubiously clean one star budget accommodation. Clearly, you’re taking a vacation. Unless you’re a professional chatter-up of chicks.  In which case, in my (granted, not very experienced) opinion, you’re fantastically bad at it.   

Hello from London!

     
     I remember a cold day in June in Chicago. It's memorable enough that it was cold in June in Chicago, but also because it was, all in all, a lovely month.  I was on a cushy fellowship, living in a fantastic city, learning incredible things, looking at incredible pictures, and reading incredible books.  On that particular cold Sunday, I was sitting in a Caribou Coffee, reading a book I had picked up in one of the many used bookstores that I haunted in that city, happy to be living-- for once-- in a place where there is the choice of not one, not two, but frankly uncountable bookstores to visit, all within reasonable walking distance.**  While I know that I should not take advice from plastic cups that hold sparkling green tea lemonade, the message printed on it has (for good or for ill) stuck with me. 

Life is waking up an hour earlier 

to live an hour more. 

     While I know that by now, my sleep debt could probably be better measured in months rather than days, or even weeks,  there is something lovely about being out and about before the daily grind begins.  No matter how tired I am, or how little I've slept, I know that if I roll from bed straight to work I will feel terrible-- like life is nothing more than workworkworksleepworkwork. This goes double now. I've been in London for the week (happy Spring Break to me!), trying vainly to finish my first chapter, something I told myself I would finish back in January. But then the doldrums set in. Then the writers block set in. Then a conference paper set in.  Then the post-conference paper writing anxiety set in. And now the 'how is it that I've been seriously working this for more than three months and I'm not done' anxiety set in, along with the looming reenrollment deadline anxiety.  So I've been at the British Library from opening time to closing time-- 10 and a half hours-- trying to read the letters I want to read, and write write write.  I have just shy of 10,000 words, but it is simultaneously too long and too short, and my argument is not so good.... and I tend to get carried away with all this worry.   
     So, it is all the more important for me to wake up an hour early and take the tube to a neighborhood I've not yet been to, and take the time to see the city before it fully wakes up. The subway is still blessedly empty, and I emerge to quiet streets, perhaps with a dog walker or two, depending on the neighborhood.  Then, sleepy employees begin to trickle in to cafes and coffee shops. Slowly, doors open, and the dog walkers give way to young mums and dads taking their kids to school, only to be replaced with brisk-walking black-suited businessmen and women, and other harried workers.  Eyes are on smartphones or the metro newspapers.  Hoards pour into the tube stops in neat, ordered lines.  The air is full of quietly stamping feet and the beeps from validated Oyster cards.  Stand on the right. Hustle on the left. Wait for descending passengers to leave the train. Mind the gap.  My mind turns once again to the things I must read, the chapter I must right.  But that hour has made a world of difference. And of course, there is coffee along the way.  

** I have been told that I tend to walk unreasonably much.  I don't think this is true; in fact, I don't always meet my fitbit step goal of 11,000 steps

It has been almost two years

And it's amazing to see just how little has changed in my life.  There is still coffee though. There is always coffee.