Jólabókaflóð 2018: A is for Ox (Lyn Davies, 2006)

My family started a tradition for ourselves last year, taking inspiration from the Jólabókaflóð tradition in Iceland.  This is a literary tradition, literally the 'Yule Book Flood', in which people are given a book and chocolate on the night before Christmas, with the intention being that you'll curl up with a good book for the evening before the following day's festivities.  In Iceland, this goes so far as to have a catalog of the new books published in the country that year easily available to every household; obviously that would be a little difficult in this country, which is rather larger.  Last year, the book I received was a collection of Jules Verne novels, a rather thick tome that I still haven't read all of (though I rather appreciated that it included Around the World in 80 Days, having recently [at the time] read Philip José Farmer's The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, which takes Verne's work and attaches a sci-fi conspiracy narrative to it, linking to the author's other 'Wold Newton' novels and stories).

This year's selection for me was rather more readable on the same day, what with only being 118 pages long.  However, it's also something that was completely up my alley, and went on my Amazon wishlist as soon as I found out it existed.  That book is A is for Ox by Lyn Davies.  There's a lot to think over in this one, to say the least.

So, first, the unwrapping experience.  After all, the gift has been here for a few days, wrapped and everything.  Wrapping paper as expected, removed, there's the big giant candy bar because Trader Joe's, and then... more wrapped things.  The book was wrapped in paper by the seller that Mom got it from, and she only opened it far enough to take out the packing slip.  But that's OK.  Feels a little weird through the second layer, like it's a short-edge-bound book or something.  And once I found an edge to start tearing from, that's what I initially thought I had, too.  Except what I thought was the spine had no words, and looked awfully squared-off.  Pulling it free, I discovered... a book in a box.  This is actually rather exciting to me; when I find a book in a box, with very few exceptions, it's a Folio Society edition of something.  These are amazing things to put on any bookshelf; the Folio Society produces high-quality hardcover editions of books with custom cover designs printed right on the bindings, no dust jackets, and boxes to protect them from shelf wear.  Sometimes the boxes themselves have artwork on them, but sometimes, as in this case, they're just plain (but quite sturdy) boxes.  The cover itself, as is perhaps fitting for the book, features a wraparound detail from an inscription in Pompeii (from a rubbing by the author), and the front cover bears an illustration from De Divina Proportione which is repeated on the title page.

The contents of the book come in two flavors.  The first 60 or so pages, and the last four, are a general history of the development of the alphabet.  The first chapter deals with the origins of writing itself in ancient Sumeria, and the influences that Sumerian writing had on that of the Egyptians.  From there, the book moves to looking at the early alphabets used by the Egyptians and Phoenicians, before the third chapter deals with the formation of letters recognizable to modern readers, showing why the Greek alphabet is so different from those of languages derived from Latin (or, as in the case of English, languages that had the Latin alphabet thrust upon them), and ending with the formation of capital letters as can be seen in Roman sites, such as Trajan's Column or the archaeological treasure trove that is Pompeii.  The fourth chapter covers the later development of minuscule, or lower-case letters, from the early Roman cursive scripts to their modern forms.  The fifth chapter is at the very end of the book, and covers modern changes to the way letters are used, both in the rise of what is functionally our modern hieroglyphs as street signs and other symbolic communication (it takes much less time to parse a sign that indicates a slippery road than to read and understand 'Warning: Slippery Roads Ahead' when you're driving at speed), and also in the form of text-message shorthand, using letters and numbers for their name value rather than their pronounciation (such as using 'U' in place of you, or '2day' in place of today).  Each chapter of the book is accompanied by illustrations depicting the writing being discussed, both with the writing isolated, and with its context shown, so that the reader is able to see what each writing system looks like and how it was used.

The second type of content found, and what is perhaps the most fascinating from a visual standpoint, is the middle portion of the book, between chapters 4 and 5.  This section consists of 26 two-page spreads, each of which is devoted to a single letter of the English alphabet.  The top half of the two pages in each case starts with the earliest known ancestor of the letter, which is almost always either Egyptian or Phoenician, though some examples of Semitic scripts appear as well.  Each step of the development of those early letters toward the Roman capitals is shown, followed by the Roman cursive, and the development from those forms to the modern lower-case, always shown through a 15th century printing type. The bottom halves of the pages are a short writeup of the origin of the letter, how it made its way to Rome, and how later scribes created what we now use. This section also includes explanations of a few alphabetic oddities such as the ſ, which is so often misread as being an f in old manuscripts, but is actually another form of lower-case S.

If there's any complaint I can pose regarding this book, it's that it doesn't cover the few letters that have been lost by the English language over the centuries.  In particular, I might have liked to see a few explorations of letters such as Eth (Ðð), Thorn (Þþ), or even the ampersand (🙲&), whose name comes from being considered the last letter of the alphabet until at least the 18th century (W, X, Y, Z, and, per se, and [and, by itself, and]).  I do think the final chapter would need an update in a newer printing (the copyright is from 2006, so predates emoji's emergence in 2009), but its use of common signs such as 'No Smoking' still work very well for illustrating what is being talked about.

Certainly a worthwhile read, and an enjoyable one as well.  Definitely a book that I would recommend for anyone who has any interest in the history of, well... writing.

A far-too-late resurrection of this place

OK, so I have a hard time committing to things like blogs and the like.  I start things, and then they just kind of fall off and I don't keep them up.  Like, say, this blog.  I started it five years ago, and then... never really stuck with it.  I should have; especially in recent years, after I've gone back to school, it would've been useful to have a place to put long-form writing when I have something of the sort, especially since I'm hesitant to put much of anything on Facebook.

There's a fairly constant refrain from my mother and brother both: I should write a blog, and review things I read, things I watch, things I play.  I love to write, and this is a good way to keep my words flowing, especially between terms at school.  Especially during the obnoxiously-long winter break, which lasts nearly a full month here.

So, let's see if I can pull this off, this time.

Summer Reading 2015 (5(a)): The Crystal Cave (Mary Stewart, 1970)

Summer Reading 2015, #5a: ‘A trilogy’, part 1

It’s time for Merlin!  Well, young Merlin.  The Crystal Cave by Mary Stewart is the first Arthurian tale I’ve read in... longer than I care to admit.  Especially given my background in such things.

I’ve been a fan of different takes on the Arthurian mythos since a very young age.  Admittedly, part of that is just the fun of the romanticized medieval setting that usually comes with it.  As a child, it absolutely caught my attention, something that certainly wasn’t hurt by a gift I was given for my eighth birthday, an Arthur-themed pop-up book that features no shortage of excitement in its pages.  The Sword in the Stone may not have been my favorite Disney film growing up (that would be Robin Hood), but that didn’t stop me from being fascinated by the story of the boy king.

(As an aside, my aunt, who gave me said pop-up book, never ceases to remind me that at the time, I was reading The Hobbit, and it made her feel kind of bad about giving me a pop-up book.  I always remind her that quite honestly, it's the only pop-up book I had as a child that stuck with me into adulthood quite that way.  Part of it may be the way it doesn’t bowdlerize the content; the illustration pictured here features those weapons plunging into and through the combatants, and the arms make plunging motions as the pages open and close.  My aunt was unaware of its presence in the book.)

So, on to this one.  The Crystal Cave is the first of Mary Stewart’s books dealing with the Arthurian themes, and focuses solely on the early life of Merlin.  Arthur only puts in two appearances, both in visions of the future.  Of course, Arthur’s childhood is the theme of the next book, so that can be better-explored next time.  Merlin is positioned as being the grandson of a Welsh king, the bastard son of Ambrosius, the cousin of Arthur, and rather than the Disneyesque wizard that he might be depicted as in many conceptions, comes across almost as a variation on Leonardo da Vinci, much of his magic being simply a sharp mind and the ability to take poetic metaphor and drag usable knowledge from it, then apply that knowledge to his works.

From the start, Merlin is an outsider, the sort who is far more interested in learning how the world around him works than in learning the ‘traditional’ male things of the era.  Even as he grows up and is drawn into travels outside of his native Wales, he’s always in that mindset, devoting his energies to a combination of learning engineering and mysticism from the chain of teachers he learns from over the years.  And these skills are put to good use; by the end of the book, Merlin has used the know-how he’s developed to get a large stone moved from Ireland to Amesbury to serve as a centerpiece to Stonehenge, here positioned as being already ancient but with the stones having fallen, a problem that he remedies as well.

Stewart absolutely knew what she was doing here; even though she calls herself out on the historical inaccuracies in an appendix at the end, it’s largely a matter of language used, not technology or politics, erring on the side of ‘recognizable’ in the sense of saying Cornwall instead of Dumnonia every time.  Honestly, I see no problem with this; one doesn’t read Arthurian lit for historical accuracy.  She also provided, as the first appendix to the book, the passage regarding Merlin from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, which she drew from in order to construct her narrative.

Of course, the story of Merlin is, almost by definition these days, inextricably linked with that of Arthur.  And as good a read as this was, it really does leave you wanting more, not least because of how it sets itself up, from the introduction but especially in the last section of the book, as being the first part of a longer tale.  Speaking of which, on to The Hollow Hills.

Summer Reading 2015 (4): The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Zac Bissonnette, 2015)

Summer Reading 2015, #4: ‘A Nonfiction Book’

Thank you, public library new book shelves, for letting something cut in line.  Merlin a little later on, as I’ve allowed The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute by Zac Bissonnette to slip in ahead of it.  Two-week checkout limits on new books will do that.

So, to start with, I suppose I should begin with what led me to pick this book up at all.  It’s somewhat eye-catching on the shelf, with the title on the spine matching the coloration of the title on the front.  And let’s face it, a book in 2015 about Beanie Babies is going very, very much against the grain, and seems rather outside of its era.  I mean, Beanie Babies haven’t been relevant since their value tanked fifteen years ago.  But that was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look... and then the jacket flaps went and mentioned the Tulip mania and yup, I’m going to pick it up and take a look, because that makes perfect sense.

For those who weren’t conscious of what was going on at the time, Beanie Babies were... possibly the most bizarre example of a collector’s frenzy over anything in my lifetime.  Let’s face it, when the popular wisdom around a line of exceedingly play-friendly plush toys becomes ‘don’t let children touch them at all’, something has gone horribly wrong.  But that, in and of itself, wouldn’t make for a particularly interesting book.  And this is where Zac Bissonnette hit on a rather more interesting way to handle his book: more than anything, this is a biography of the business life of Ty Warner, from his beginnings as a salesman for Dakin, through the start of his own company (initially specializing in plush cats), all the way up to (and past) his 2014 conviction for tax evasion.

The link to Dakin surprised me somewhat; as a child, I had a downright ridiculous number of Dakin-made Garfield plushes (along with a few Applause-branded ones after the companies merged).  But they weren’t terribly play-friendly, as I recall; the traditional plush as created by Dakin was very, very full of stuffing, so they tended to stick to a specific pose.  That, as noted in this book, was the big trick to Ty Warner’s success: by understuffing the plush as a whole and filling a few strategic spots with PVC pellets to add weight, the Ty plush could be easily posed and played with, and he absolutely used that as a selling point.  Additionally, Warner has hand-designed almost every single plush that his company has ever marketed, and his attention to detail is definitely noticeable.

That said, the rise and fall of Beanie Babies as a valuable commodity was only partially related to the attention to detail.  That aspect of the bubble is explored as well, when the book reaches that point in the timeline, along with an examination of how the mania spread geographically.  The whole book is filled with original research the author did, interviewing as many people involved in the mania as he could; he even reached out to Ty Warner, who declined the offer, but Warner’s personality absolutely shows through, both the positive and negative aspects of it.

It’s absolutely a fascinating read, this.  And let’s face it, speculative manias on the scale of Dutch tulips, Dot-Com stocks, and Beanie Babies are one of those things that one should be aware of, if only to have an idea of how to avoid getting caught up in one.

Next up: Merlin stuff (again, for real this time)

Summer Reading 2015 (3): Horrorstör (Grady Hendrix, 2014)

Summer Reading 2015, #3: ‘A book based entirely on its cover’, Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix.

So, I have no clue why Amazon threw this into my ‘you might like’ list, apparently based solely on my having read something by Mark Danielewski.  It has very little to do with anything Danielewski has written, other than the haunted house aspect and the smattering of extradiegetic documents provided every few chapters.  That said, the cover grabbed my attention immediately, and I almost ordered it on the spot (only holding back due to the public library having a copy). It was a fun read, if rather unapologetically living in the ‘guilty pleasure’ category.  Fine literature this is not.

The one thing that helped me the most in reading this was having actually, finally, *been* to an IKEA store earlier this year.  I’ve been to one of the things exactly once, but that was enough to make sure that every description made perfect sense to me.  After all, that’s the core concept at work here: a haunted IKEA ORSK, positioned as an American knock-off of the big blue box.  Every box is ticked: two-story atrium with escalators to take you inside, upstairs showrooms to let you see what the ORSK-furnished lifestyle is like, incomprehensible names for everything in the place (featuring plenty of characters not on English-language keyboards), impulse-buy space downstairs, followed by the fifty-foot-ceiling flatpack warehouse... 

But this book is wearing its nature on its sleeve; IKEA is name-checked before the first chapter is even over, and the narrator herself isn’t afraid to compare her employer with the Swedish original and find ORSK wanting.  But that’s really not what the book is about, and it doesn’t hesitate to jump straight into its central premise: IKEA and similar stores with ‘guided experiences’ lull consumers into a nigh-hypnotic state of shopping trance, such that your will to resist the merchandise in front of you is reduced.  This ends up being a recurring theme throughout the book, even after it first toys with being a somewhat generic ‘unseen intruder’ thriller (someone is in here at night, vandalizing the place!), then turns into a full-blown haunted house horror novel.

This particular ORSK, you see, was inadvertently built atop the former site of an 1830s prison of the Panopticon model, wardened by a deranged psychiatrist who was convinced that literally working his inmates to the point of physical breakdown in sisyphean menial tasks was the proper way to shape them into obedient members of society.  This becomes a problem when an ill-advised seance in the ORSK store (note: this book contains a blatant idiot ball plot, in that none of the people involved stop to consider whether this is a good idea, given the other events up to that point) results in said psychiatrist’s spirit being given a body to inhabit... and the spirits of all his dead inmates rising up as his personal army, intent on helping drag the hapless wageslaves into the same hellish afterlife they’ve been trapped within.

Of course, as a satire, the book also isn’t afraid to pepper the whole thing with plenty of jabs at corporate culture and cults-of-personality, a general theme being that the characters have been targetted by the warden because they are, in some way, deficient and need to be ‘fixed’ through his sadistic, cult-like methods.

As an aside, the writer is clearly not the sort of person you want to be locked in an IKEA with at night.  Some of the implements bodged together from flat-packed parts in the second half of the book are decidedly unsettling, especially when paired with the chapter openings, which feature line-art drawings of IKEA-esque furniture and catalog descriptions... which change to show the very devices being used on the characters during the later part of the book.

Which then, I guess, brings me to the design itself.  The book is consciously shaped and sized to appear like an IKEA catalog, featuring a store map on the inside front cover, and the pages in the immediate front and back are designed to look like company copy that you’d find in such a catalog.  The colophon is even hidden in a page that is designed to look like an order form.

I absolutely tore through this book.  From when I first got my hands on it at the library through to when I finished reading it, it was less than 30 hours.  But then, that’s just a sign of a good thriller: it grabs you, and doesn’t let you put it down until the last page is over.

Next in the reading order will be 'A trilogy’ (+1 +2, huh, didn’t realize there was a fifth in here) : Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy.