Things They Should Invent: MoralOfTheStory.com

My fairy goddaughter has an uncommon name.  I decided I'd try to find a book with a protagonist who shares her name and, after much searching, was able to find one.  Unfortunately, it wasn't currently in print in Canada and the library didn't have it, so I had to order it from the UK.  Because of this, I didn't know how the protagonist was portrayed or what the moral of the story was.

(I prefer to curate the books I give to children as gifts.  While I don't object to people - including children - reading junk or fluff (as I'm sure you've noticed from this year's experiment of posting the books I read), I like to give them things that are quality.)

Fortunately, my fairy goddaughter can't read yet, so her parents could screen the book for appropriate message and characterization.  If it's not appropriate, they can just not read it to her.

But by this time next year, she'll probably be able to read. So if I decide to send her a book that I can't preview first for whatever reason, she will be able to read it right away without the story being screened for appropriateness first (or, at least, end up in the awkward situation of her parents wanting to take away a book she's enthusiastic about reading.)

And, just a couple of years later, she'll be reading chapter books.  It's one thing to plop down in Mabel's Fables and read a pile of picture books that are a dozen pages each with only a couple of sentences on each page, to make sure that the characterization and moral of each book is something I want to put in front of a child I love.  But it would be quite another thing to have to read several hundred pages (even in the large, easy font of children's chapter books) in order to make an informed choice.  Especially since the pool of children I buy books for is rapidly expanding (Baby Cousin 3.0 just made his debut a few days ago!) and I try not to duplicate purchases among children who are acquainted with each other and might plausibly visit each other's homes and paw through each other's bookshelves. 

 My proposed solution: a single comprehensive website (MoralOfTheStory.com) that describes the ending and moral of children's books.  (Example: "Ending: he tries green eggs and ham and likes it. Moral of the story: try new foods, you might like them.")  It could also give a brief description of the characterization of the named characters  (or, if that's too much, just the title character), so before you buy Amelia Bedelia for a little girl named Amelia, you know that Amelia Bedelia is a bit of a ditz but an excellent baker.

There are websites to tell you whether various children's media is too scary or too "adult" - the exact reasons why they're rated PG, for example.  But, at least for books that are so young they're definitely rated G, I haven't been able to find any single reliable source of the moral of the story or the characterization of the protagonist.

It would be especially useful to integrate this into Amazon, since children's books bought sight unseen would most likely be bought on the internet.

Books read in November 2014

New:

1. The Long Way Home by Louise Penny
2. Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer
3. The Serpent Garden by Judith Merkle Riley
4. Hild by Nicola Griffith
5. Longbourn by Jo Baker

Reread:

1. Indulgence in Death
2. Possession in Death

Reaching for the dictionary

I'm currently reading Hild by Nicola Griffith (no spoilers please, I'm only a little ways in), which is set in 7th century English and therefore contains a lot of Old English words to describe concepts for which le mot juste doesn't quite exist in modern English.

My first instinct is to look up every one of these words I don't recognize, and, before I discovered the book has a glossary in the back (which still isn't as comprehensive as I need), I was rushing to Google every single time, which is intrusive, slowing down my reading and spoiling the atmosphere.

A while back I read a book in German for the first time in years. I've always had more difficulty reading in German than in other languages, and when I was in school it would take me forever because I felt the need to look up every word I didn't understand and annotate the text as I went.  But in my recent German reading endeavour, I discovered that translator brain make it possible for me to tell which parts are and aren't important, even when I don't understand every word, and to look up only the words I need to understand the story as a whole.


So, knowing full well that I can get full enjoyment and comprehension out of a story without looking up the words I don't understand, why do I feel compelled to do this when I'm reading in English?

To further complicate things, this is something I deliberately didn't do when I was a kid.  Our teachers would always tell us to look up words we don't understand and keep a running list of words we'd looked up, and I never wanted to do that.  I just wanted to keep reading the story.

So what's changed?

My first thought was that it might be translator brain - I live in a world where I have to know what all the English words mean.  But translator brain also caused me to stop using the dictionary when reading in German, so I don't know if it can be the cause of two opposite actions.

Then I wondered if it might be because I've been reading quite a bit of historical non-fiction lately, in which I looked up all the things I didn't know ( also most often the names of objects used in historical times that are no longer used today).  Since non-fiction isn't building a world for me to get lost in, it seems more "normal" to be googling as I go.

But maybe it's just Google brain! In daily life I've become so accustomed to googling every passing thought that I have trouble turning off that impulse when visiting fictional universes.  I guess Hild is just the first book I've read in quite a while that leaves me with so many questions that the googling becomes intrusive.

Which perhaps means I need to be reading more challenging books...

Books read in October 2014

New:

1. The Queen's Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth's Court by Anna Whitelock
2. The Glitter and the Gold: The American Duchess in Her Own Words by Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
3. All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin
4. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock
5. A Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy by Helen Rappaport

Reread:

1. Fantasy in Death

Books read in September 2014

New:

1. Delusion in Death by J.D. Robb
2. North of the DMZ: Essays on Daily Life in North Korea by Andrei Lankov
3. The Orenda by Joseph Boyden

Reread:

1. Promises in Death
2. Kindred in Death
3. Missing in Death

Books read in August 2014

New:

1. Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle
2. The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)
3. The Unquiet (short story anthology) by Robb, Blaney, Gaffney, Ryan and McComas
4. The Corpse with the Golden Nose by Cathy Ace
5. Celebrity in Death by J.D. Robb

Reread:

1. Strangers in Death
2. Salvation in Death
3. Ritual in Death

Books read in July 2014

New:

1. Love and Forgetting: A husband and wife's journey through dementia by Julie Macfie Sobol & Ken Sobol
2. The Little Princesses: The Story of the Queen's Childhood by Marion Crawford (the Queen's former governess!)
3. Miss Manners Minds Your Business by Judith Martin and Nicholas Ivor Martin
4. Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain by Lucy Lethbridge

Reread:

1. Eternity in Death
2. Creation in Death

Dementia brings back the monsters under the bed?

I've been reading Love and Forgetting: A husband and wife's journey through dementia by Julie Macfie Sobol & Ken Sobol, which tell the story of Ken Sobol's dementia (Lewy Body Disease) both in the first person and from his wife's (Julie's) perspective.

The following passage is a first-person description of the hallucinations he'd have.  As usual, any typos are my own:

Moving day was October 1, 2007. When I got up the first night at the new place to use the washroom, I was startled to find that the stacks of boxes, floor lamps and other scattered leftover from the move were providing material for new kinds of bizarre shapes. The forms were back again the next night. In fact, it got to so that virtually every evening I would find waiting for me outside the bedroom door a troupe of odd, inexplicable creatures doing their best to shake my grip on reality.

These were not like the alarming nighttime apparitions I'd seen in the hospital after the TURP procedure. the new ones came in two basic guises: animals of various sorts - mostly small, skittering creatures - and tall, thin types. Sometimes they ignored me. Sometimes, but only if I turned toward them and started, they became animated. Then, for example, the low rectangular radiator in the hallway might suddenly convert itself into a small sheep; a cluster of scarves on the coat hook might become a high fashion hat; an Inuit print could spring to live as a circle of wolves following me with their eyes. (A litho resembling such a wolf scene hangs on the wall of our home office.) Some of the more feminine figures, if that is the proper designation for them, carried what appeared to be small creatures in their arms.

At first, I freaked. No surprise there.But then I noticed that whenever I approached them, they would immediately rise and move off in a slow motion down the hallway, or simply disintegrate on the spot, before reforming into normal lamps, jackets and whatever other objects in the darkness had led me to imagine their existence.

On the nights that followed, some of the forms even entered our bedroom and then at times, I had to waken Julie to make sure they went away. (Not that she eve saw them, of course, but her voice was reassuring to me and commanding to the apparitions.) Ultimately, it seemed clear to me they meant no harm nor presented any real danger. All the same, when I later came across a reference book that called them "benign visions," I was relieved.

I rarely got a glimpse of the hall dwellers' faces; I wasn't even sure they had any. They never spoke, and except for one accidental instance, they always managed to fade away before I made physical contact. The incident where I touched one took place as I came out of the bathroom one evening and tripped on something (a shoe, I think,), losing my balance. As I thrust out my arm toward the wall to catch myself, so did a vaguely alpaca-like creature. We met and touched at a corner - Julie's terrycloth bathrobe and my shaggy Irish wool sweater hanging on the coat rack. The creature and I both sprang back in alarm. When I looked again it had disappeared, fading into the woodwork.

I didn't know what to make of this tactile experience; I still don't. But as time passed, I grew so accustomed to the apparitions that I began looking forward, albeit in a slightly uneasy way, to seeing what form they would take each night.

Then there were those other apparitions, the ones that could come at any time and that manifested themselves not as things I see, but as things watching me. They lurked just outside the corner of my eye; if I glanced their way, they also would run away, as if they didn't like being seen. (Of course, maybe they were just getting old and cranky, like the rest of us when we reach a certain age.) A few times I found myself addressing one of them, momentarily forgetting that I was asking for an opinion from a pile of clothing or perhaps quarreling with something as vague as a wisp or memory.

What struck me about this passage is the extent to which his apparitions resembled the monsters that haunted me when I was a very small child.

My monsters very rarely moved around, instead preferring to stand around menacingly.  I was never brave enough to engage with them so I don't know what would have happened. But his description of how everyday objects would turn into apparitions really reminds me of my childhood monsters.

In the past few years, with my grandmothers declining and various people around me having babies, I've been thinking that old age in some ways resembles a reversion to early childhood.  But it never occurred to me that that could apply to cognitive processes as well.

Books read in June 2014

New:

1. The Master of All Desires by Judith Merkle Riley
2. Mary Poppins, She Wrote by Valerie Lawson
3. Life Below Stairs: Domestic Servants in England from Victorian Times by Frank Edward Huggett
4. She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor
5. New York to Dallas by J.D. Robb

Reread:

1. Innocent in Death

Books read in May 2014

I had a very busy month and didn't get to read very much.

New:

1. Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb
2. River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay

Reread:

1. Born in Death

Books read in April 2014

New:

1. The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling)
2. Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
4. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

Reread:

1. Memory in Death
2. Haunted in Death

Things They Should Invent: memorial library books

Picture this: a loved one dies, so you donate a copy (or multiple copies) of their favourite book or books to the library.  The books get an elegant notation inside the cover saying "In memory of [name]", and are then added to the circulating collection. This means people who check out that book in the future learn about the existence of your deceased loved one and the fact that they enjoyed that book, thereby introducing your deceased loved one to like minds and kindred spirits. There could also be a webpage where there's a blurb about each of the memorialized people, so if the book you check out of the library turns out to be a memorial, you can look the person up and learn more about them.

Possible option: donate the deceased's own books to the library in their memory.  The suitability of this approach would depend on the nature and condition of the books (I doubt the library needs any more Harry Potters, or old dog-eared copies of books they already have better copies of) but if the books were suitable for donation it would certainly be an elegant approach.

Problems to which I don't yet have solutions:  what happens if a memorial book is lost or damaged? What happens if, after some time passes, the library needs to get rid of some of the memorial books?  (For example, they don't have nearly as many copies of Harry Potter as they had when the books first came out, so they've probably sold some copies.)

Books read in March 2014

New:

1. How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny
2. How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet
3. American Savage by Dan Savage
4. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Reread:

1. Visions in Death
2. Survivor in Death
3. Origin in Death

Books read in February 2014

New books:

1. Behind the Scenes at Downton Abbey by Emma Rowley
2. The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II by Charles Glass
3. Bone and Bread by Saleema Nawaz
4. Dexter's Final Cut by Jeff Lindsay
5. Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman

From my ongoing comfort-food reread of In Death:

1. Imitation in Death
2. Remember When
3. Divided in Death

Once again, a clever detail in the most recent Dexter book (spoiler-free)

When I first saw the Dexter TV series, I thought Michael C. Hall was too attractive for the role of Dexter. I've been reading the Dexter series since the first book came out, and I didn't see the character as anywhere near as conventionally attractive as Michael C. Hall.

So I was quite delighted to see, in Double Dexter, that Dexter seemed to have noticed for the first time that he's rather handsome. That totally resolve that very minor, completely subjective, inconsistency between the books and the casting - Dexter didn't seem handsome on paper because he's a non-omniscient narrator and he never thought to notice before!

Something similar happened with the most recent book.  In Dexter by Design, Dexter says "Of course, for some bizarre reason, we don't have a National Registry of Who Your Friends Are".  As I pointed out when I read it, Facebook serves that function.

And in the most recent book, Dexter's Final Cut, Dexter and Debra are shown Facebook by a civilian, and it turns out they weren't previously aware of it!  It doesn't address why they weren't aware of it (maybe the books are set a few years ago?) but it does make it apparent that it wasn't a tool they had in previous books.

I love how this author closes tiny little plot holes that aren't even really plot holes!

Books read in January 2014

I recently realized that I read more books than I thought I did.  So, for 2014, I'm going to keep track of the books I read each month. Might be interesting to see how many I get done or if any patterns emerge. (Although which books I read when is really a function of the library's holds system rather than any deliberate choice.)

New books (i.e. read for the first time):

1. Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey by the Countess of Carnarvon
2. The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Chol-Hwan Kang and Pierre Rigoulet
3. To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl and Carol McD. Wallace
4.  How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman

I'm also doing an ongoing comfort-food reread of the In Death series. I don't really think of this as "books I've read" because they're not new, but nevertheless they are books and I did read them. This month I read:

1. Purity in Death
2. Portrait in Death

Hmm...that's fewer than I expected when I tweeted excitedly about how many books I'd read earlier this month...

How to tell if you've already read a particular library book

Sometimes I come across a book that seems vaguely familiar in concept, but I'm not sure if I've read it already or not.  I don't really care to waste my time rereading something that turned out to be forgettable, but I don't want to not read an interest-sounding or recommended book just because I might have once read something similar.

The library doesn't keep records of which books you've checked out in the past - which makes perfect sense from a privacy perspective, not to mention what a huge-ass database that would end up being.

But I've just worked out a way to figure out if you've checked out a particular book before.  And the solution is beautifully simple:

Search your email.

If you checked out the book by putting it on hold and having them send it to your local library branch, you'll have an email alert that it's ready to be picked up.  If you kept the book until nearly the due date, you'll have an email alert that it's due soon.  (Helpful hint for Toronto Public Library patrons: search your email for the call number rather than the book title, since the email notifications used to not contain the title.)

This won't work if you don't use email alerts, or if you delete your emails, or if your primary method of library use is to browse the shelves.  But if your library transactions habitually pass through your email, you can find a record of what you've taken out of the library in your email.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

In my readings about neuroplasticity, I came across a mention of a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which is a drawing course that uses neuroplasticity principles to improve your drawing skills by strengthening your right brain.  I have no interest in drawing but I did want to see neuroplasticity happen, so I decided to try it out.  (This is also why blogging has been particularly slow lately - I've had to spend a lot of time drawing!)

Here's what I discovered:

Using my right brain only literally makes my brain hurt!  One of the earlier exercises is copying a line drawing upside down.  Because it's upside down, it's far more difficult to recognize what you're drawing, so instead of thinking "This is a leg that I'm drawing now" you think in terms of "How do the length and angle of this line relate to the line I just drew?"  Because your left brain can't name the parts of what you're drawing, it stops participating in the exercise, leaving it to the right brain only.  My poor, underused right brain was not accustomed to this, and the exercise gave me the worst headache I've had since the first day I tried going coffee-free on weekends.  If I hadn't known about the neuroplasticity benefits, I would have given up right then and there.

My left brain quickly adapted. When I did that first, painful upside-down line drawing, the exercise was a success in that I couldn't recognize what I was copying so I copied the actual lines far more accurately.  However, by the time I got to the second (which was on another day, with at least one sleep in between), rather than my right brain being stronger, I found my left brain had adapted to the exercise and I could recognize what I was drawing far more readily, which defeated the purpose of the exercise and resulted in a less realistic drawing.

My drawing did improve, but not as much as I had hoped. The last pictures I drew were significantly better than the first ones.  However, they weren't nearly as good as I had hoped they would be based on the description of what the book was meant to achieve.  I wasn't able to enjoy my clear, obvious, significant improvement because the drawings still didn't come out nearly as well as I wanted.

This book helps you see, but doesn't help you actually draw. The core function of the book is to make you see what's actually in front of you - how the lines and spaces and light and shadows relate to each other - rather than letting your left brain fill in the blank. The problem - as with everything physical and tangible - is that I can't always make my hand make the pencil do what I want it to.  I draw a line, and it looks wrong.  Using the principles taught in the book, I am now able to think "That should be on a steeper slant." But when I erase it and try to redraw it on a steeper slant... it comes out exactly where I put it in the first place!  This book doesn't do anything to help with that, and it's currently the biggest obstacle to my drawings coming out the way I want them to. 

I'd also hoped that it might give me drawing skills that enable me to do a quick, semi-realistic sketch, the sort of thing I could bust out as a parlour trick.  I was picturing sitting and colouring with my fairy goddaughter, and while she makes me a page of crayon scribbles that I will keep forever, I make her a recognizable picture of her dog or something.  But instead the process is slow and technical, and requires a subject or model that stays still (which my fairy goddaughter's dog most definitely does not.)  It gets results with time invested and hard work, but doesn't give you the ability to improvise delightfully.  Much like my music skills, actually.


Turns out I don't like drawing. I never got to the point of enjoying the drawing exercises.  Every time I got to one, I'd be like "Aww, man, I have to draw now!"  I found it tedious and time-consuming and got no pleasure out of it.  I wasn't expecting to enjoy it - I was in this for neuroplasticity, not for art skills - but because of this I found it a bit annoying when the book suggested that I was probably pleased with my drawing or I probably found this particular exercise enjoyable.  In fact, the exercise I found most enjoyable was the pure contour drawing, where you try to visually copy the contours of what you're drawing without looking at the paper.  This is a visualization exercise rather than a drawing exercise - it isn't intended to produce an actual drawing and most often just produces a scribble - and I found I enjoyed it specifically because there were no expectations of the end result.

I don't know if this actually had any neuroplasticity effects.  I noticed my left brain compensating, and I noticed that after the first couple exercises my brain stopped hurting during the right-brain-only work, but I don't know if that's my right brain getting stronger or just that my left brain figured out a way to barge in and help.  Other than that, I didn't notice anything, but the fact that I don't perceive it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Analogy for why social media is not a replacement for RSS

One of the things I found most bizarre in all the discussion surrounding the cancellation of Google Reader is that some people (including, apparently, some who work at Google) seem to think that social media is a suitable replacement for a feed reader.  As though we're perfectly content with reading whatever our internet friends choose to share and have no need whatsoever to curate our own reading list.

Today my shower gave me an analogy:

I've just caught up on the Inspector Gamache series, and am waiting with bated breath for the next book to come out in August.

So suppose, on the release date in August, I walk into a bookstore and ask "Do you have the latest Inspector Gamache book?"

The bookstore worker answers, "Here are some books I read and enjoyed recently!"

That doesn't solve my problem, does it?  I want to know what happened with Inspector Beauvoir.  I want to know how (or whether) Peter and Clara's marriage is holding up. I want to find out who leaked the video.

The books the bookstore worker read and enjoyed recently won't address these needs.  They may well be good books, I may well enjoy them, they may well end up being new favourites that I end up following diligently.  But, even if I read and enjoy them all, I will still want to read the next Inspector Gamache.

Lesen auf Deutsch

I'm currently reading a book in German (Der Knochenmann by Wolf Haas, published in English as The Bone Man - no spoilers please, I'm only partway through).  This is noteworthy because I haven't done any long-form reading in German in 13 years, and even then German has always been a difficult language for me to read.  When I was in school, I'd be sitting there with my dictionary looking up every single word I don't understand, then using my grammar rules to decode how the elements in the sentences relate to each other.

But I was surprised to discover that now it's much faster going!  Not because I understand more German, but because I seem to know intuitively which parts I don't need to understand.  Based on the words I do understand and my knowledge of how a novel works, I can tell "Okay, this is a soccer game, these few paragraphs are describing gameplay, anything I don't understand is soccer-related, no need to look stuff up." So I skim over those paragraphs with little understanding except that the local team won and the goaltender was awesome, and don't reach for my dictionary until we're back into the main plot.

Similarly, I find I'm not analyzing the grammar to figure out how the elements in a sentence relate to each other.  I'm thinking "How would these elements relate to each other logically?" and only digging down to the grammar if the logical interpretation doesn't make sense in context.

Surprisingly, this works!  I looked up an English excerpt to make sure I haven't missed anything important, and I haven't! Everything I glossed over contained exactly what I expected it to! It could be I missed a gun on the mantlepiece, I don't know yet, but worst case I'm surprised by the ending rather than seeing it coming like I usually do in mysteries.

I think this is all a result of translation brain.  When you're translating, you have to render not the words per se, but rather the truth of what the text is saying.  The vast majority of the time, it doesn't matter whether the author of the text used a word that translates as "however" or "moreover", what matters is whether the relationship between the two ideas in question is "however" or "moreover".  (I've always thought fill in the blank exercises for linking words would be useful for translation students.)  It doesn't matter that the source text used the pluperfect, what matters is which tense most accurately represents the idea being expressed in the target language.

So after 13 years of thinking this way (coincidentally, the same amount of time since I last read in German - my last German class was the year before my first translation class), I seem to have developed intuition for which unknown words or syntax is ripe with meaning and which parts will end up saying exactly what I'd expect them to say.